I'm in New Orleans for the Academy Health Annual Research Meeting. Academy Health is the weirdly named health services research society. I had a poster presentation this morning, now I'm just going to be hanging out and listening to people, mostly.
If anything exciting comes up I'll let you know. But for now I'll just say that health services research is especially wonky and boring and weird in this country because of our irrational, fragmented, wasteful, incoherent health care system. We have such an inefficient and ineffective system because of freedom, unlike those totalitarian dungeons in Europe where they spend half as much, get better results, and cover everybody. But that's slavery, which we won't allow to happen here.
5 comments:
It will get better and more efficient now that we have a businessman running things instead of a politician.
Ha! Hope that comment was made ironically! But I know better than to expect either a sense of irony or a sense of humor from a right-winger. Not in the DNA. You are deluded and ignorant. Unless, of course, you wrote the comment sardonically, in which case you are not a right-winger...
No one is addressing the underlying problem of the meteoric rise in the underlying cost of services, and that's really what's driving the crisis. Instead, the focus seems to be on insurance for those services.
Which hospital posts their prices for services and outcome rates so that these services can be value shopped? And under the current system, why should the patient care if all costs are covered and they have little to no "skin in the game"?
Common self-dealing practices common in the healthcare industry would land you in jail in most any other industry such as "steering" to hospitals for services in which physicians have a deep financial interest.
Then there's the problem of "defensive medicine" that is driven by the unbridled civil laws where millions can be won in court for the slightest infraction. Do you know what an OB/GYN's yearly malpractice insurance costs are?
I'm not blaming only one party. Few want to acknowledge these glaring problems in the delivery of medical services.
Did you read Cervantes's posts at all over the past decade? Sheesh. It's not just his posts, it's in all other news sources that don't spew propaganda. Everywhere else in the world, governments cover their people's healthcare. It's in Michael Moore's fact-based film, "Sicko." How do they do it? Easy! They give a shit about their citizens.
The current Republicans' approach? Give tax cuts to the rich and take away coverage from the non-rich.
All the debate is a bunch of hot air. Either we believe our citizens deserve health care, and we cover them--for less money than currently, and provide more services--or we prioritize greed. The rest is all details.
Q.E.D.
Shorter Smith: "I don't know anything about economics."
For the grownups: People come to the US for medical treatments from Canada and GB. We don't go there.
I don't want a VA style government healthcare. I don't want a race to the bottom.
And that's pretty much what it will be cuz we've already seen a taste of it with the VA.
This is what scares people
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