You obviously have no idea how much medical research costs.
Also, if you axed doctors' salaries, why would they waste their time with medical school?
want proof of how FuckedUP Health care in the US is?
- Thread starter fvaldes
- Start date
You obviously have no idea how much medical research costs.
Also, if you axed doctors' salaries, why would they waste their time with medical school?
Don't tell my fellow Americans that. They want to believe that the US healthcare system is so much better than the European Healthcare system. Ask the average European making over $500,000 if they don't mind paying a little more in taxes so that the less well off don't have to die on the street....
The answer of course is "no". I don't have one friend who fits that description who doesn't mind living in a society that provides more equitable healthcare.....
yep.. talking like a typical american..
who would want to waste their time with medical school?
hmm how about somebody that actually CARES about helping others more than being rich??
i hear what you are saying and I agree completely. The problem has to do a lot with the way Americans are raised and how they are "educated".
Help somebody in need? nooo... if I have the money they should be able to get it too right? get a job bum! every man for itself... that is how it works here ..
compassion, humanity, fairness and dignity have all being dissapearing since WWII in this country.
That is fucking retarded. You are asking to remove the profit incentive for being a doctor. At that point every single doctor would fucking leave and work overseas. You think a doctor is going to like having their income axed in half?
As alexb said, same thing for pharmaceuticals. Force the prices to be lowered and you will suddenly stop seeing new medical breakthroughs being made.
People work for MONEY (this is how capitalism works). You would remove any incentive for smart people to get involved in the medical industry, which would lower the quality of healthcare tremendously.
You are a socialist idiot for saying something like that.
hold on there son...nobody said there shouldn't be ANY money incentive for doctors...but the other poster was saying that people become doctors basically to make money. That is BS and if it is true it proves why the system sucks.
A doctor has to make a nice salary, they deserve it BUT the main reason to become a doctor should be TO HELP other human beings.
Wo the hell said anything about removing the profit incentive from being a doctor? I suggest you turn off the TV more often
Based on your posts you certainly want to lower money incentives, for both doctors and researchers. There should never be a situation in which the government artificially lowers pay at all. If that happens many of the good doctors/researchers will leave. Many of the new potential doctors/researchers will decide instead to pursue a different career.
So it seems like you are for diluting the talent in the health care industry (which is one of the most important industry to have competent people working in).
Any claim that a certain profession is making 'too much money' annoys me greatly. The amount of money they make is determined exactly by supply and demand, if it was easier to become a good doctor (or if having a good doctor wasn't in as high of a demand) the pay would go down accordingly. Don't attack somebodies pay because you think it is 'too much', if doctors get paid too much, more competent people would become doctors... which would lower each doctors pay.
I dont care of a doctor makes a lot of money but that CANNOT be the main reason to become a doctor. and I feel it is in this country. Same for lawyers and other professions.
I don't think a medicine student that loves his field will leave his profession because instead of earning a gazillion he will earn millions. Love for the profession first... profit later... thats how i see it man.
The every man for himself thing usually works better. But access to health care is such a fundamental humanitarian issue, that maybe its economic downsides and burdens should be dealt with/absorbed.
We're supposedly the wealthiest, most powerful nation on earth, yet (probably most of) our people don't have access to a health care system that's anywhere close to being in parity with our place in the world.
Someone should propose paying for it by privatizing education, as that's a "market" where privatization might actually have a net positive effect and cost the government less.
uh yeah it's not about being rich, but when you get over $200,000 in med school debt, how do you plan on paying it off when working for a free clinic at a low salary?
how about how expensive research is, aside from paying the researchers? you've obviously never worked in any kind of lab reliant on grants for research.
best healthcare solution is lots of exercise and no sugar (unless you're exercising)
oh and the ability to realize that you're going to need to be able to afford that monthly payment if you don't have an employer that will pay it for you.
maybe they should have a government program just for special cases in which the insurance co. won't cover the individual. having a blanket program seems like beating a gnat with a sledgehammer.
oh and the ability to realize that you're going to need to be able to afford that monthly payment if you don't have an employer that will pay it for you.
maybe they should have a government program just for special cases in which the insurance co. won't cover the individual. having a blanket program seems like beating a gnat with a sledgehammer.
Because health care is a positive right, and free speech is a negative right.
A positive right confers an obligation on someone else to provide for you. Positive rights are the hallmark of a collectivist society (socialism)
A negative right indicates that no one should interfere with you. Negative rights are necessary for a constitutional or "free" society.
Enormous difference. Not all so-called rights are in fact rights. People assume because they want something or it is necessary for survival, it must be a right. In that case, education is a right. Food is a right. Housing is a right. Perhaps sex is a right. Clean water, clean air. Vitamins and minerals. The list becomes endless.
Healthcare conforms to the limits of the natural world. That is to say, it is scarce. There are not unlimited drugs, doctors or beds. Thus, a profit mechanism is the tested and proven method for rationing scarce goods to maximum efficiency. It's also the driver of medical innovation because there is a profit incentive to serve people better, and in new ways.
The current systems are not free market, and thus there is no competition. Health care almost EVERYWHERE is based on someone other than the patient paying the doctor directly, and thus costs rise because the patient is disassociated from the costs of his care, and the possibilities to pursue alternative care.
It's a pointless argument from my perspective, because the people think it should be "free" then government will give them a system that is "free" in that no patient is accountable for the costs, and thus the doctors are not accountable to the patients.
What the people living under socialized medicine regimes do not understand, is that someone is paying. They just don't pay at the time they need it. Nothing is "free". Doctors and nurses still make great livings. The drug companies and medical equipment suppliers still rack up massive profits, even in socialized systems. The places where cuts come, are always on service to patients. With collective pricing, the patient is unable to compare the value of one service to another, and thus is kept insulated from choice and rational decision making.
Insurance has already done that. I have family members who are doctors, and have had doctors in my family for years - Not a single one has encouraged their children to go into the medical profession after what insurance has done to it over the past decade or so. Doctors in private practice can't survive without taking insurance unless they're maybe a top doctor in Manhattan, and the insurance companies dictate what the doctors get paid for procedures, dictate what frequency of visits is "necessary" (read: covered by insurance), load down the practices with forms and billing, and put more of a strain on the doctor's resources by pretty much requiring someone full time to just deal with the insurance company's crap. Encouraging most treatment to come from the primary care physician undoubtedly can lower the quality of healthcare (since specialists, well, specialize in a specific area of medical knowledge).
Between insurance companies lowering payouts for doctors, and malpractice premiums rising, more and more doctors are leaving practice, with the system the way it is. I don't have a solution to what's happening to the US healthcare system right now, but I know for a fact that it's broken.
It already works that way in the USA. You aren't going to get turned down at a hospital.
Grad students don't have that kind of debt in Europe due to public funding of Education papajohn.
As for research - Karolinska Institute, Imperial, Cambridge and Oxford have some of the best medical research institutes on the planet.
As any prof at Top Tier Medical Schools - Stanford, Hopkins, Harvard or Yale - and they will agree.
As you're well aware, Karolinska academics decide the Nobel Prize in Medicine each year. Cambridge churns out some of the best quantitative minds - consistently - that the world knows. Imperial too, which can compete with MIT or Caltech.
No one is saying that well paid doctors shouldn't make money - millions either.
However, where in the hypocratic oath does it say doctors should be concerned principally about money?
All this bullshit talk about economic theory from people who don't have
any credentials at best and is not supported by any data at worst.
There are absolutely and fundamentally externalities involved with Healthcare. That among many other issues supports some government intervention.
Besides the fact that anyone who is becoming a doctor just because of the profit is in the wrong profession.
An exotic interest rate options trader makes just as much money as a cardiologist, urologist or neurosurgeon. Try that profession if profit is your only motive.
Lastly, I there's plenty of private care in Europe and no one is advocating not having private care.
However, things like education, healthcare...for goodness sakes, if other wealthy, civilized western countries can provide those basic things for the people who can't afford it, why can't the USA?
Half of the world's top medicals are publically funded. The gov't supports public education which means that students don't have to take out debt and can hence work for public hospitals and still not be in debt.
Also, alot of people from working class backgrounds who would probably never make it to medical schools in up there.
Here's is verifiable data to back up my contention:
Times Higher Supplement in the UK ranked of the top 100 world biomedicine
Here is the top 20:
1) Harvard (US)
2) Cambridge (UK)
3) Oxford (UK)
4) Imperial College London (UK)
5) Stanford (US)
6) Johns Hopkins (US)
7) Karolinska Institute (Sweden)
8) Yale (US)
9) UC Berkeley (US)
10) UCSD (US)
11) Beijing (China)
12) MIT (US)
13) Tokyo (Japan)
14) Melbourne (Australia)
15) Sydney (Australia)
16) Heidelberg (Germany)
17) Duke (US)
18) UCSF (US)
19) University College London (UK)
20) Toronto (Canada)
40+ million americans walking around with less healthcare affects me as a business person. It means I have less healthy people to hire. If an employees' kids get sick it means they have to take off work. American business people are at a disadvantage compared to their European counterparts.
Do you know how expensive it is to try to provide coverage for just a few employees??
The costs not being internalized affects everyone not just the individual man or woman not insured....
If you are a graphical person, one could look at it llike this:
Q.E.D.
yeah ... but you are going to be treated as dirt and go home to a $80,000 bill for your broken pinky.
I think people misunderstand what profit communicates to us as customers in the market place.
High profits, means growth opportunities. Everyone runs towards profitable industries, and away from unprofitable ones.
So why have health care costs continued to soar, and there has been no rush into that industry by profit seeking firms and individuals, to get a piece of the action?
That is the fundamental question no one is asking.
Why is supply/demand not working, and why are high prices not being liquidated by competition?
Necessarily, in a world of scarce resources, if we want to bring health care costs down and increase coverage, we have to provide more supply. The government solution is to cap entry, and then cap profit. Which (as usual with government policy) will create the unintended consequence of further driving down supply.
Government health care (and any other service) always create rationing. That is not a solution, anymore than wheeling people out into the streets to die, in order to improve the mortality rate statistics.
This is the Hippocratic Oath that doctors take. SOMEONE PLEASE POINT OUT WHERE IT TALKS ABOUT BEING PRIMARILY MOTIVATED BY MONEY??
I swear by Apollo Physician and Asclepius and Hygieia and Panaceia and all the gods, and goddesses, making them my witnesses, that I will fulfil according to my ability and judgment this oath and this covenant:
To hold him who has taught me this art as equal to my parents and to live my life in partnership with him, and if he is in need of money to give him a share of mine, and to regard his offspring as equal to my brothers in male lineage and to teach them this art–if they desire to learn it–without fee and covenant; to give a share of precepts and oral instruction and all the other learning to my sons and to the sons of him who has instructed me and to pupils who have signed the covenant and have taken the oath according to medical law, but to no one else.
I will apply dietic measures for the benefit of the sick according to my ability and judgment; I will keep them from harm and injustice.
I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody if asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect. Similarly I will not give to a woman an abortive remedy. In purity and holiness I will guard my life and my art.
I will not use the knife, not even on sufferers from stone, but will withdraw in favor of such men as are engaged in this work.
Whatever houses I may visit, I will come for the benefit of the sick, remaining free of all intentional injustice, of all mischief and in particular of sexual relations with both female and male persons, be they free or slaves.
What I may see or hear in the course of treatment or even outside of the treatment in regard to the life of men, which on no account one must spread abroad, I will keep myself holding such things shameful to be spoken about.
If I fulfill this oath and do not violate it, may it be granted to me to enjoy life and art, being honored with fame among all men for all time to come; if I transgress it and swear falsely, may the opposite of all this be my lot.
Hippocratic Oath - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I swear by Apollo Physician and Asclepius and Hygieia and Panaceia and all the gods, and goddesses, making them my witnesses, that I will fulfil according to my ability and judgment this oath and this covenant:
To hold him who has taught me this art as equal to my parents and to live my life in partnership with him, and if he is in need of money to give him a share of mine, and to regard his offspring as equal to my brothers in male lineage and to teach them this art–if they desire to learn it–without fee and covenant; to give a share of precepts and oral instruction and all the other learning to my sons and to the sons of him who has instructed me and to pupils who have signed the covenant and have taken the oath according to medical law, but to no one else.
I will apply dietic measures for the benefit of the sick according to my ability and judgment; I will keep them from harm and injustice.
I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody if asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect. Similarly I will not give to a woman an abortive remedy. In purity and holiness I will guard my life and my art.
I will not use the knife, not even on sufferers from stone, but will withdraw in favor of such men as are engaged in this work.
Whatever houses I may visit, I will come for the benefit of the sick, remaining free of all intentional injustice, of all mischief and in particular of sexual relations with both female and male persons, be they free or slaves.
What I may see or hear in the course of treatment or even outside of the treatment in regard to the life of men, which on no account one must spread abroad, I will keep myself holding such things shameful to be spoken about.
If I fulfill this oath and do not violate it, may it be granted to me to enjoy life and art, being honored with fame among all men for all time to come; if I transgress it and swear falsely, may the opposite of all this be my lot.
Hippocratic Oath - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Grad students don't have that kind of debt in Europe due to public funding of Education papajohn.
As for research - Karolinska Institute, Imperial, Cambridge and Oxford have some of the best medical research institutes on the planet.
As any prof at Top Tier Medical Schools - Stanford, Hopkins, Harvard or Yale - and they will agree.
As you're well aware, Karolinska academics decide the Nobel Prize in Medicine each year. Cambridge churns out some of the best quantitative minds - consistently - that the world knows. Imperial too, which can compete with MIT or Caltech.
No one is saying that well paid doctors shouldn't make money - millions either.
However, where in the hypocratic oath does it say doctors should be concerned principally about money?
All this bullshit talk about economic theory from people who don't have
any credentials at best and is not supported by any data at worst.
There are absolutely and fundamentally externalities involved with Healthcare. That among many other issues supports some government intervention.
Besides the fact that anyone who is becoming a doctor just because of the profit is in the wrong profession.
An exotic interest rate options trader makes just as much money as a cardiologist, urologist or neurosurgeon. Try that profession if profit is your only motive.
Lastly, I there's plenty of private care in Europe and no one is advocating not having private care.
However, things like education, healthcare...for goodness sakes, if other wealthy, civilized western countries can provide those basic things for the people who can't afford it, why can't the USA?
Half of the world's top medicals are publically funded. The gov't supports public education which means that students don't have to take out debt and can hence work for public hospitals and still not be in debt.
Also, alot of people from working class backgrounds who would probably never make it to medical schools in up there.
Here's is verifiable data to back up my contention:
Times Higher Supplement in the UK ranked of the top 100 world biomedicine
Here is the top 20:
1) Harvard (US)
2) Cambridge (UK)
3) Oxford (UK)
4) Imperial College London (UK)
5) Stanford (US)
6) Johns Hopkins (US)
7) Karolinska Institute (Sweden)
8) Yale (US)
9) UC Berkeley (US)
10) UCSD (US)
11) Beijing (China)
12) MIT (US)
13) Tokyo (Japan)
14) Melbourne (Australia)
15) Sydney (Australia)
16) Heidelberg (Germany)
17) Duke (US)
18) UCSF (US)
19) University College London (UK)
20) Toronto (Canada)
40+ million americans walking around with less healthcare affects me as a business person. It means I have less healthy people to hire. If an employees' kids get sick it means they have to take off work. American business people are at a disadvantage compared to their European counterparts.
Do you know how expensive it is to try to provide coverage for just a few employees??
The costs not being internalized affects everyone not just the individual man or woman not insured....
If you are a graphical person, one could look at it llike this:
Q.E.D.
nothing much else to add. Thank you sir.