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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (380071)	4/24/2008 11:23:05 AM
From: i-node	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1578495

Do you ever talk to actual practioners about the system? You're kidding. This is all one of my businesses does -- and I deal with these issues personally for physicians on a weekly basis. Now, I think if you go to ANY physician and say, "Could our health care system be improved?" they will answer "Sure." If you go to any and say, "Is the system of reimbursement by insurance companies broken?" they will answer "Hell, yes." But if you ask, "Do you think your patients would be better served by a Medicare-like government run organization as a single payer for all medical services?", I doubt more than 10% would answer affirmatively (and most of those who do would likely be academics who have not the slightest understanding of the real world practice of medicine). The reality is that more of the innovative developments in modern medicine originate in the United States than anywhere else, and it happens because we have private enterprise with a profit motive. When you have drug companies out developing drugs like some of the modern chemo drugs, there has to be a reason for them to do it. When you eliminate the profit motive, you eliminate the innovation. 5% of all medical cost in the United States is for cancer treatment. The vast majority of this is borne by Medicare -- probably $100 Billion/year at this point. If we threw more money at some of the more promising cures (like the radio wave research that is ongoing at MD Anderson) we might well eliminate the majority of that expense over a few years time.