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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Cogito who wrote (51530)	3/3/2008 10:08:32 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 543500

I'm having trouble reconciling these two things that you said. Sorry. By service level I didn't mean volume in the sense that everyone is getting them. I meant more procedures per person, more diagnostic stuff and more advanced stuff. Breadth vs depth. At least I think that's what I meant. It's getting a bit late for my brain to be working. I may revise this in the morning. <g> And aren't the costs of most procedures rising? Demand, the overhead of regulation, malpractice, paperwork, med school, profit. There's opportunity there for cost cutting. New, complicated procedures will continue to escalate, though. You may have noticed LindyBill advocating full body scans. One may have saved his life, but imagine everyone getting one every few years as a general diagnostic tool. There goes the GDP. I do believe, however, that if every single entity involved with my care and the insurance company, too, weren't making a profit, then the overall care might have ended up costing much less. I think there's opportunity there, but don't forget that profit drives quality improvements. Those treatments might not have been available for you if someone hadn't been motivated by profit in their development and proliferation.

To: Cogito who wrote (51530)	3/4/2008 12:39:50 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 543500

And aren't the costs of most procedures rising? Doesn't that mean that even if service levels remained the same, costs would still be increasing? You have to consider the decline in the value of money over time. I'm not saying that procedures that do stay the same don't get more expensive in real terms. Some increase, some decrease, and its hard to know what the net is. But at least most of the increase of costs is driven by new treatments, and changes to old ones rather than doing the same thing and having it cost more. It may even be the case than for things that really do remain fairly static the cost is going down in real terms.