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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (162957)	11/8/2008 10:52:25 PM
From: patron_anejo_por_favor	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 306849

Actually docs in America make tons more than anywhere else in the world. That's one reason there's a steady wave of foreign graduates teeming to our shores, yearning to breath free and practice expensively. If we were ever to aim for a health cost level comparable to Japan or Germany's, docs incomes would get a huge haircut. At least 50%. Hospitals revenues would be cut similarly and a significant number would close. Drugs would be cut tremendously, so would medical device and imaging costs. Access to the system would become more restricted. That's the price. OTOH, there would be less time and effort wasted with intermediaries, insurance authorizations, paper work/bureaucracies. These are not trivial gains. Not to mention reigning in the lawyers. You could easily whack 35%-40% off the system if you're willing to accept the non-financial pain. This includes deaths at the margin, of course, because the US system provides a lot of relatively expensive, inefficient end stage care that other countries don't (by choice). Someone would need to make hard decisions to make this happen, I'm not sure our current elected representatives have the stones to do it.