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from the think-of-the-children's...-mother dept.
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
The US has a shameful record when it comes to caring for its moms. As Ars has reported before, the rate of women dying during pregnancy or childbirth is higher—much higher—than in any other developed country. By some estimates, mothers die in the US at a rate six-times that seen in Italy and three-times the rate in the UK, for instance. And of those that survive, tens of thousands suffer devastating injuries and near-death experiences each year.
Nevertheless, health researchers, hospital organizations, policy makers, and state task forces have been working to understand and reverse the horrific numbers—often doing so with limited resources and reliance on volunteers. While reports have offered glimpses of the problem, a new investigation by USA Today provides one of the sharpest pictures yet.
Many of the pregnant women and mothers who suffer and die in this country do so from easily preventable, common complications—and hospitals know exactly what safety features and practices are needed to spare mothers' lives and suffering, they just aren't using them. Women are left to bleed to death because doctors don't bother monitoring blood loss. Women suffer strokes and seizures and even die because doctors and nurses fail to treat their high blood pressure in time. The bottom line is stunning, simple negligence.
[...] While high blood pressure is one of the top causes of maternal deaths and complications, experts estimate that up to 60 percent of hypertensive deaths are preventable.
Hemorrhaging is another common but easily treatable complication. Women can bleed to death in as little as five minutes during childbirth. Yet experts estimate that 90 percent of maternal deaths from extreme blood loss are preventable. Such strategies to avoid harms are simple things, like weighing bloody pads to monitor blood loss (not relying on inaccurate visual estimates), having medications and supplies to curb blood loss readily available in a mobile cart, and responding promptly to signs of trouble.
Such simple steps have been recommended by experts for years. But in interviews with USA Today, many hospitals admitted they weren't following guidelines.
To put the data in real terms, USA Todaytold the story of 24-year-old Ali Lowry, who bled internally for hours after delivering by Cesarean section in an Ohio hospital in 2013. Her blood pressure registered at alarmingly low levels—52/26, 57/25, 56/24, 59/27—for more than three hours before staff responded. By the time she was airlifted to another hospital for life-saving surgery, her heart had stopped and she needed a hysterectomy. She eventually settled a lawsuit with her doctor and the hospital, which denied wrongdoing.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 5, Insightful) by anubi on Friday August 03 2018, @10:23AM (153 children)
Healthcare is expensive.
Every dollar spent for a doctor and care comes right out of profit.
That's completely against the American version of healthcare, which are huge buildings, healthcare logo on top, filled with desk hens fluttering from desk to desk, but not a stethoscope in sight.
Its a Business. Making money. The American Way.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 4, Informative) by FatPhil on Friday August 03 2018, @10:28AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 5, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday August 03 2018, @10:45AM (102 children)
Do you know why those hens are strapped to those desks instead of monitoring patients? They're RNs that are dealing with the enormous stacks of paperwork required by the government and the insurance companies for anyone to be paid for their work. That's also why you never see a doctor on the floor; they have entirely different stacks of paperwork. I bet just a little more bureaucracy and regulations written by people who know nothing about medicine would fix the situation right up though.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by MostCynical on Friday August 03 2018, @11:14AM
A third, but not all insurance or regulatory forms.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2016/09/07/doctors-wasting-over-two-thirds-of-their-time-doing-paperwork/ [forbes.com]
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 03 2018, @11:15AM (67 children)
Yup... the paperwork gets done and submitted. They get paid for that.
The patient goes without. That's a cost center. They don't get paid for servicing a patient.
The fundamentals of business... expand profit centers, minimize cost centers.
Hire lots of desk hens. Minimize doctors. Get Paid!
Congress Agrees!
(Score: 5, Interesting) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday August 03 2018, @11:31AM (66 children)
You're missing the point. Doctors and nurses would much rather be seeing patients than playing secretary but they can't or they don't get paid. Thus the recent occurrence of cash-only healthcare facilities. Out in Oklahoma right now you can either go to a hospital and get knee surgery that is going to cost you over $6K even with insurance or you can go to the cash-only surgery center down the road, get the operation done by a couple guys who do nothing but knee surgery, and hand them $2k cash; no insurance company involved because they do not accept any form of insurance, medicare, medicaid, or anything else. You also have the added benefit of being able to see a price list and shop around between it and other cash-only places.
Every piece of paperwork reduces quality of care and increases cost. And there is an absurd number of pieces for every patient.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 03 2018, @12:24PM (10 children)
This makes a lot of sense, and if I were king of the U.S. of A. I'd be instituting "Medicare for all" but trying to drive it toward the cash-only level of paperwork. Shopping doctors makes sense. Basic affordable healthcare makes sense. If you want the latest in joint replacements, advanced cancer treatments, heart transplants, etc. - get yourself into the insurance game, but for basic healthcare there should be a simpler way.
I did an ER visit in Dusseldorf in 1990 with blood poisoning starting in the left hand. It was the most efficient medical experience I've ever had, and mostly because the money side of the equation was trivialized. There was a 35 marks (about US$20) cash charge for the visit which included 1 hour's attention of an MD and nurse, a cast, a tetanus series, antibiotics, etc. Sure, it cost far more to deliver the care than that, that's what the taxes are paying for: to keep the hospital open and the people on staff, the trivial cash charge for usage is similar to office visit copays when you have insurance in the US.
I did a very similar visit to an ER in Florida in 2010, and it was the fiasco you would imagine if you've ever been to a U.S. E.R. - 6 hours in total, 5 minutes with the doc, 30 minutes with the billing officer, 4 trumped up pre-doc visit tests that told him nothing of value, but ran up the bill to the insurance, $200 out of my pocket, something like $6000 on the initial bill to insurance - god knows how that shook out after negotiation, probably something like $400 from the insurance company to the hospital in the end, but now we've got integrated insurer/provider companies who are starting to book those big bills as if they are actually getting paid. It's time to start dragging the heads of these institutions into the streets and showing them the guillotine.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 03 2018, @02:10PM (9 children)
Why does it have to be Medicare? Let communities (including groups spread out across different governmental jurisdictions) form their own damn groups with their own damn definitions of obligation.
The problem with the U.S. is that the government has made health care into a political creature, and the lawyers treat health care as a big cash cow for their litigious nature.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 03 2018, @02:23PM (8 children)
Medicare has first mover advantage.
Surely a capitalist would understand first mover advantage!
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 03 2018, @02:28PM (7 children)
That's it. The only "advantage" is that Medicare can use the men with guns to extract money from you.
That's sounds totally un-American, and it's certainly anti-Capitalist.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 03 2018, @04:16PM (1 child)
You have no idea what first mover advantage is or why it's relevant here, do you?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 03 2018, @04:39PM
First mover advantage. Just ask Friendster about it.
That's why we're all Egyptian.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 03 2018, @06:48PM (4 children)
No, the "advantage" of Medicare is that it pools risk. With everyone in one pool, the average cost per person goes down, because the risk is spread across the entire population, it ends some types of rent seeking, and because there is only one "plan." True, some people will pay more, but we are already subsidizing people's healthcare, so that is a super small percentage (i.e. less than 5%). Multiple studies, even by Libertarian and right-wing groups show that Medicare for All would be less expensive, etc. because it is more efficient, among other benefits. This is even when you add it as an additional option for buy in. There is a reason why almost everyone who is eligible signs up for Part B, C, and D, and doesn't get private insurance, despite being available.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 03 2018, @06:53PM (1 child)
You prove it by competing in the market place. May the best pool win.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04 2018, @03:27AM
I would if I could, but the law won't allow them to do so. But as I said, in the demographics where enrolling in Medicare is allowed, they routinely stomp the competition in terms of sign-ups.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 03 2018, @07:21PM (1 child)
Yes, that's a good point. I saw a couple hilarious (or at least I try to laugh here because otherwise I will be consumed by despair) pieces on Common Dreams and Alternet reporting this. Here's one: Reporting on Bernie Sanders' Medicare for All Plan Makes the Media Forget How Math Works [alternet.org] [FAIR].
My point about first mover was that medicare is a well-understood program. None of the private insurance providers have anywhere near the experience working with populations near or below the poverty line or experience with the level of governmental oversight we'd expect out of single payer healthcare that medicare does. Additionally, many social workers (for example, people at HHS offices and people who are involved in charity programs currently run by hospitals and community foundations--they pretty much all know each other in any given community too, that is, the professional networks are established and close-knit) have a lot of institutional knowledge about medicare.
Medicare for all is a no-brainer if there ever was one.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04 2018, @04:06AM
Sadly the no-brainers still find it perplexing.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by anubi on Friday August 03 2018, @12:25PM (37 children)
I got misread terribly!
Its not the doctors I blame at all! Those are those schmoes in the trenches trying to do the best they can under the environment they are commissioned to work within. Another profession with almost identical restraints are Teachers.
Its the Employment Environment which I consider at fault. Its all about profit. Not care.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 03 2018, @02:13PM (2 children)
Someone, somewhere in society needs to be making a profit so that it's actually possible to pay to care for people.
The bean counters are actually quite important; it just so happens that the government has decoupled the economics of health care from reality, and so the bean counters are also behaving increasingly stupid.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Friday August 03 2018, @03:17PM (1 child)
Bean counters have been over rated for decades now. A hospital needs to at least break even, or make a little profit. But a hospital should never be ABOUT profit. The United States took a wrong turn somewhere.
Damned near everything about a hospital is overpriced, to pay for Big Pharma, "insurance", lawyers, and those damned bean counters. Add in a profit motive, and the average American simply can't afford to get the sniffles. If you do get sick or injured, you better have some other plan. The VERY LAST THING you want to do, is go to the ER.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 03 2018, @04:19PM
Nobody knows what that sweet spot is; society must find it continuously.
That's the whole point of a market: To find what society needs/wants and who's going to pay for it.
The problem with health care (down to the very foundation) has been virtually detached from market forces, including clear lines of obligation and responsibility; there's no good way to find that sweet spot, and so it has become a political issue—the outcome is arbitrary and capricious, and depends on people making the best sounding speeches rather.
(Score: 3, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday August 03 2018, @02:14PM (33 children)
It's about profit at the cash-only places too. Profit is not a dirty word. It just means the people providing the product or service don't have to work for free and might even be able to grow their business. There's not even anything wrong with making as much profit as you possibly can (Overall, not on each individual transaction. Ask Wal-Mart or Amazon about this.); if a free market with real competition exists, it just means that you've found the optimally correct price for your product or service.
The problem is when you start getting into monopoly and quasi-monopoly situations like non-cash healthcare, insurance, and government programs. It fucks that optimal pricing ability all kinds of up. Not having fixed and published prices is some quality shitwaddery as well but that's not entirely on the healthcare providers. The way insurance and government programs work, it fairly well requires them to either play that particular type of silly buggers or go bankrupt.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 03 2018, @02:26PM (30 children)
On your medical bill, your insurance company will FINALLY tell you what something cost: Without them, you would have paid "$142" for that shot/jab you received, but not only did the insurance company pay the bill for you, but also only paid the low, negotiated price "$12".
So, there you go.
You have no idea what anything costs until afterwards, and you find out that if you'd paid in cash, you might have been charged $142 rather than $12. All of this basically makes it impossible for people to interact with this part of the economy unless they integrate themselves into socialistic governmental programs, or their political creatures, the insurance companies.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday August 03 2018, @03:17PM (29 children)
Experiment: Go in with insurance and pay for a tetanus shot for one of your children. Then go in and pay for the same treatment for your other child with cash at the exact same facility. I guarantee you the two bills won't look remotely similar and I'll buy you a beer if the cash bill comes to more than what the insurance company statement reads. That's not a bet, by the way. I'll buy you a beer either way for opening your mind up and testing your assumptions.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 03 2018, @04:19PM (27 children)
I've tried this before with labwork. The cash cost is always around an order of magnitude higher.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 03 2018, @05:13PM (26 children)
Yup, insurance can collectively bargain for cheaper prices and hospital administrators realized they can charge the people who pay directly any amount they want. It is almost guaranteed to be more expensive to fight the charges than to just pay up.
Uzzy do YOU get it yet? The "free market" is not actually quite so free and often you get price gauging because the average Joe rarely has the time to research everything and price collusion is certainly something that has happened before, is happening now, and will continue to happen as long as a business is unethical and thinks they can pull it off. Most government regulations are there to protect the people, the insurance/billing is the REAL problem adding a shit ton of overhead with the bean counters.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 03 2018, @05:49PM (13 children)
Governmental regulation makes such competition unlikely.
I'll take Freedom over your Paternalism, thanks.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 03 2018, @06:33PM (12 children)
Take a look around you. Everything you see is contoured by the elite who own 80% of everything, and your "competition" concept is laughably naive. Git educated son.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 03 2018, @06:56PM (11 children)
The point is to have a culture and a legal framework in place that allows for at least the possibility of competition.
Under such a system, it doesn't matter if control over society's resources collects under a few elite; those few will have proven themselves good stewards of society's resources. The same can never be said of an organization that commandeers stewardship at the point of a gun.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 03 2018, @07:47PM
Ah, so then we can have a one world government that is proven to generate philosopher-kings. Perhaps even kings with healing hands who are angelic in nature! These wise angels governing over us would also gladly allow alternatives to flourish, and it would never occur to their pure hearts to use anti-competitive tactics to shut down competition.
It's almost as though somebody has already analyzed this argument before.... It's like something that came up a few episodes ago on the hit Netflix series SoylentNews: Of Men and Angels.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 03 2018, @09:41PM (9 children)
That is what we have now genius. Technically if you can secure the funding you are able to create just about any business you'd like. You're 100% free to do so, just find the $millions to even get on the same level as your competition. Sadly this system also allows for the shady few assholes to corner markets and do lots of shady shit to make you go under. That is the result of your "possibility of competition". Technically it is true, but in reality that competition you so value becomes collusion and pseudo-monopolies.
The only real way for the average person to compete is to create tax payer funded alternatives, this lets them cut out the rent-seeking profiteering behavior and create more efficient services. However people such as yourself cry foul and support the corrupt POSSIBILITY of competition system we have now. You're so naive it hurts replying to you.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday August 04 2018, @01:20AM (8 children)
You have an extremely limited mind.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04 2018, @04:09AM (3 children)
Or you suck at reading comprehension. Possibly you just glazed over everything else until you saw something you could criticize. My money is on you being too dumb to understand the reality unfolding around you.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday August 04 2018, @04:24AM (2 children)
Nah, see I have this thing called an "imagination" that I can use to come up with new ideas completely out of the blue. I know it hurts when you first start using your brain but it does get easier after a little bit.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04 2018, @05:55AM (1 child)
Maybe it hurt you, that first bout of usage must have created some serious damage that never fully healed.
#reeeeeeeetard
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday August 04 2018, @09:48PM
That's some weak shit even by your normal can't-troll-your-way-out-of-a-paper-bag standard. Practice more.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04 2018, @04:18AM (3 children)
We're waiting for you to propose an alternative that is not tax funded and does not suffer from the inherent contradictions of capitalism.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday August 04 2018, @04:21AM (2 children)
Sorry, until I see some individual thought from you lot, I'm not pitching in to help on something that isn't my problem. Help yourselves or you get no help from me.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04 2018, @05:57AM (1 child)
Can we just settle for no help from you? Safer that way >:D
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday August 04 2018, @09:49PM
Nice one. +1 for you.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by HiThere on Friday August 03 2018, @06:40PM (5 children)
Additionally, many medical problems need to be treated *immediately*. You don't have time to "shop around", presuming you are sufficiently mobile to do so. When an ambulance delivers you somewhere, you can't change your mind and ask to be delivered somewhere else. (And an ambulance ride across the street can run $2000. One hospital I know put in an overhead corridor over a street, with all the costs and paperwork that involves, to save itself the cost of having an ambulance take people from their ward to the XRay center.)
Some of this is regulations. Some is insurance companies. Some is lawyers. Some is "other unreasonable charges". You can't point to any one place and be either right or wrong. When being discharged from the hospital my wife was always required to wait for a wheelchair to carry her down to the street, even though she was being discharged as fully mobile. (This wasn't always true, but she could walk a mile on a flat surface, and all the hospital corridors were flat.) Well, this was handled by volunteers, so there was no expense, but the requirement was there to protect the hospital. (That said, it was often a good idea, as when she left the hospital she always tired easily. Lying in bed for a week does that to you.)
Other people have had other experiences, but my experiences say that shopping for medical assistance is often impossible. You've got to take what is immediately presented. Later in the process you may be able to transfer to another facility. Now this is clearly a different circumstance than surgeries that can be done "when convenient", but I've had many more experiences with "care is needed NOW!!!" than with "do it when it's convenient"....outside of scheduled doctor visits.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 03 2018, @06:58PM (1 child)
The Free Market is NOT about immediate results; it's about iteration; it's about evolution by variation and selection.
People talk about their experiences, and thereby shape other people's future decisions.
People pay insurance companies to do that research for them in advance.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 03 2018, @07:18PM
No, YOURS is a tired line of reasoning. Like these base principles will magically work out with complex human behaviors and artificial constructs such as labor and service markets.
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 03 2018, @10:16PM
The Free Market is NOT about immediate results; it's about iteration; it's about evolution by variation and selection.
People talk about their experiences, and thereby shape other people's future decisions.
People pay insurance companies to do that research for them in advance.
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04 2018, @01:27AM
The Free Market is NOT about immediate results; it's about iteration; it's about evolution by variation and selection.
People talk about their experiences, and thereby shape other people's future decisions.
People pay insurance companies to do that research for them in advance.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04 2018, @03:28PM
The Free Market is NOT about immediate results; it's about iteration; it's about evolution by variation and selection.
People talk about their experiences, and thereby shape other people's future decisions.
People pay insurance companies to do that research for them in advance.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04 2018, @06:48AM
Clearly different AC here. One who actually works in the healthcare industry.
That collective bargaining isn't free for the healthcare providers to endure.
In addition to delaying payment for services rendered, said bargaining and extra work to otherwise get payment ties up enough staff to create dedicated departments. An appalling amount of resources are spent fighting insurance to actually pay for things. That being said, Insurance refusing tests isn't entirely uncalled for as there are plenty of opportunistic doctors who will take advantage of the system any way they can. Without some insurance pushback, insurance would function like a lever a provider could pull and it puts cash in their pocket.
What would be less expensive than funding entire departments? People walking in with cash. My particular area of the country(US) is full of 501c3 healthcare entities. Cash payment is around 40-45% of the official stated cost for SOME service lines and Lab isn't necessarily one of them. Lab involves a tremendous amount of manual work, specialized analyzers, and consumables.
Lab work, in a general case, isn't particularly simple. There is neither a single analyzer one can throw samples into and just get results or a magic stain one can apply under a microscope. Assuming that whatever lab you went to can even do the necessary test so it isn't sent somewhere else, you still have to fund an enormous staff and pay for all those FDA regulated reagents/consumables. Imagine having to constantly buy HP printer ink to run your business but you absolutely have to buy your "ink" from Siemens or GE Healthcare. Lives are at stake; as are lawsuits.
(Score: 2) by Spamalope on Saturday August 04 2018, @01:34PM (4 children)
A group here started publishing actual going rates for medical services so patients would know that the $25k service they were just billed for is normally $2.5k. (Using numbers from an actual bill of mine)
The state house leapt into action to fix this obvious problem!
They banned informing consumers about the customary pricing. Hurts profitability and the negotiating power of insurance companies dontcha know...
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday August 04 2018, @09:53PM (3 children)
Nice. I think you know the solution to that particular problem though. When your employee (state rep) is fucking shit up instead of doing their job, you fire them.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Sunday August 05 2018, @01:51AM (2 children)
I've held that position for a long long time. Trouble is, they get to keep their jobs too long. What think ye if we voted much more often. Maybe even a running tally of approval and at some reasonable sampling period we oust them. Cut way down on the waste of campaigning- if we don't like you, you're gone quick, before you do much more damage. Just like real employment.
(Score: 3, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday August 05 2018, @02:44AM (1 child)
Just be more literal. Use real fire.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Sunday August 05 2018, @03:12AM
Great idea, but be careful, golem wood fires rage.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday August 03 2018, @05:45PM
Yeah, sorry, direct experience here. Some years ago I had a tiny problem that needed a CT scan, no insurance. They billed me for $2,800 for just the CT. I won't go into the rest. I did research and found Medicare would pay $600 for that exact same CT. Insurance companies use Medicare "Codes" and payments for reference. The rest, cash patients, pay "suggest retail price".
It's much like auto parts- you'll go to a 3rd-party shop, they'll put in whatever part they feel like, and you'll pay dealer list price, even if the shop paid 1/20 for the part, and it's legal in USA. (one of the main reasons I do most if not all my own work).
I don't drink much, but a Bitcoin would be an acceptable substitute.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04 2018, @12:17AM (1 child)
I'm a US-ian, and I've never heard of cash-only medical facilities. Usually, having insurance coverage is a requirement just for scheduling an appointment. An ability to pay must be demonstrated.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday August 04 2018, @01:21AM
They exist but they're fairly new in this incarnation. They've only really cropped up since Obamacare.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Friday August 03 2018, @03:15PM (14 children)
That's great, but what are you going to do if you need heart surgery? Or some time in ICU?
All that money you spent in the cash only clinics won't count towards your deducible, so there is little reason to use the cash-only clinics if you think you might need to use your insurance.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday August 03 2018, @03:20PM (13 children)
That's where things like an HSA and cash-only facilities that are willing to finance the debt for you (most are from what I hear) come in. It's still going to be massively less expensive.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 03 2018, @05:16PM (7 children)
So we're still back to square one with many people unable to afford insurance, but if they can't then one health crisis and they are ruined.
Great system! The best! The only metric we care about is doing gangbusters! Oh what metric? People not getting a free lunch! Hands outta my pocket bitch, die in the gutter you worthless moneyless scum!
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday August 04 2018, @01:23AM (6 children)
What part of get the treatment and then pay it out says no healthcare to you? Wait, did you want someone else to pay for what you receive? Okay, I get you now.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04 2018, @02:56AM (5 children)
With health insurance you are paying for what you aren't getting. You're paying for the armies of MBAs to skim off most of your payments to line their pockets and build up a useless paperwork empire. You're paying for the armies of MBAs that get in the way of the nurses and doctors by understaffing the crews. You're paying for armies of MBAs to block and even override the decisions experienced doctors regarding treating patients. You're paying for armies of MBAs that collude with insurance companies to rip you the fuck off [propublica.org]. Notice a common thread in that?
You of all people should be a big fan of single-payer.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday August 04 2018, @04:01AM (2 children)
You've got yourself a fallacy going there. It is not a binary choice. There are as many options as you can think up.
What gives you that idea? If it's compulsory it's no way in hell ever going to get my backing. I'm about individual liberty. If it's not compulsory, it's not single-payer because generally healthy folks are going to opt out rather than pay for something they're not going to be using.
All that aside, I fundamentally dislike insurance of any kind. Given the choice, I prefer the route of personal responsibility for myself. What you do is your business but I strongly dislike the ideas of others paying my way or of wasting money.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04 2018, @04:13AM (1 child)
Because single payer is more efficient and has better health outcomes for the entire country. If you are against it then you are an idiot. It is that simple, and for someone qho cries "taxation is theft" it seems like you would especially appreciate more efficient usage if your tax dollars.
I know what you'll argue, "that requires more money taken out of my pockets by the barrel of a gun!!!" but that is stupidly short sighted.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday August 04 2018, @09:55PM
More efficient use of money stolen from my pocket is not a good thing or a bad thing, it's an irrelevant thing.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04 2018, @04:20AM (1 child)
That's not the system he proposed.
However, the system he does propose constitutes slavery. If you get sick, you become enslaved to paying back the capitalists (with interest, compounded) if you want to get well again. Or you could just die. Your choice.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday August 04 2018, @04:26AM
Slavery? Really? Idiot.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Friday August 03 2018, @05:51PM (4 children)
And when I have a crushingly high bill? I know, perhaps someone could sell insurance to cover those events? Do those cash clinics provide ICUs and all manner of specialized services?
Look, I am not defending the current situation, but these cash clinics are not a solution either. You are going to need to go to a traditional (insurance driven) medical provider some time, and without insurance, you will be bankrupted if you don't have insurance. So, you need to address my comment of deductibles.
I believe that the root of the problem is that there is too much profit in medicine. The excess profit allows insurance companies to siphon off approximately 1/3 of all medical costs while massively distorting the market. That distortion prevents meaningful change.
The other part of the problem is that too many idiots in the USA believe that the current situation actually provides the best medical care: it doesn't. It frequently provides more expensive but less effective treatments (speaking from personal experience). The only way medicine in the USA is greater than in other countries is cost.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday August 03 2018, @06:45PM
That's not strictly true. Many experimental tools were first used in US medicine...though possibly only in the hospitals associated with an engineering college, I'd need to check that.
However, it is broadly true...depending on which country you are comparing it with, and which medical specialty.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday August 04 2018, @01:36AM (2 children)
Let me answer that question with another question. What makes you think you deserve millions of dollars worth of treatment?
Seriously, if you were contributing millions of dollars worth of value to society, you would be being paid millions of dollars. You're not, so what makes you think that you deserve that much value worth of the products of other people's labors?
Regardless, you're looking to pick a fight where there isn't one to be had. If you want insurance, pay for insurance and go to a facility that accepts it. I personally think you'd be better off using an HSA and cash-only facilities and taking an insurance policy designed strictly for catastrophic issues but whatever blows your skirt up.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 06 2018, @04:26PM (1 child)
Because they are a living breathing human being you fucking sociopath.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday August 06 2018, @07:41PM
That you so obviously cannot pin down my emotions regarding this issue tells me that you're the one with a lack of empathy. Care to try again?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by tfried on Friday August 03 2018, @09:26PM (1 child)
While that is a very promising concept, indeed, it simply cannot be generalized (enough). It only works for procedures where what needs to be done and how is known beforehand with high confidence, and there is no significant time pressure. Then - and only then - patients can ask for a definite price beforehand, and shop around, if they do not like the price tag. Similarly, then and only then, doctors will be able to cut down on their bureaucracy, radically. Essentially because they only need to do it once, and then just copy the calculation to the next patient.
There are plenty of situations where this may apply, but there is absolutely no shortage of situations where it does not. In many cases there will be real or perceived pressure to act quickly, while the patient is not in a state to go shopping around. In the vast majority of cases, an unknown number of diagnostic procedures will be needed to determine what is actually the issue, before, and even during therapeutic measures.
"Doctor I'm kinda feeling funny, today. What's it going to cost to fix me?" I guess I should try that line on my next check-up. But realistically, a lot of medical costs cannot be quantified in advance. But if there is going to be any kind of retroactive control over the billing in those situations, it's going to be done by professionals. Such as an insurance.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday August 04 2018, @01:39AM
I didn't say it was a perfect solution to all the healthcare needs of the nation. It's damned nice to have around as an alternative though.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Friday August 03 2018, @01:09PM (1 child)
Nowadays, it's mostly computerized checklists and such rather than paperwork. Which is a valuable efficiency if only because it solves the "can't read the doctor's handwriting" problem.
That said, according to my MD sister, one of the more spectacular inefficiencies is that she spends a large portion of her day clicking through modal alert boxes. The reason for this is that if you have a modal alert box for every possible thing that can go wrong, the liability for a mistake transfers from the hospital to the doctor. Rarely, those boxes actually alert someone to a potential problem, e.g. drug combinations with bad side effects, but those are few and far between.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday August 03 2018, @01:42PM
How many of us watch people click whatever is necessary to dismiss those modal boxes, frustrated that something critical might be missed. I have never done that tho.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RS3 on Friday August 03 2018, @01:40PM (22 children)
You're certainly correct and insightful as always. My mom's been in hospital probably 45 days so far this year and I with her much of the time, so I have a lot of direct observation.
The RNs and patient techs are mostly with patients, there just aren't enough of them. I often have a direct view of the central nurse station and it's often empty. The RNs have rolling computers so all "paperwork" is done that way, and yes, more time is spent on the computer than taking BP, IV, medications, etc. The new software (EPIC) was supposed to streamline everything but so far it seems there's much redundancy, also much gets missed, departments don't seem to communicate through the software, etc.
I've also see that this hospital and healthcare company is advertising on Indeed for EPIC software support / admins, which might be a good thing for patients.
Doctors are scant, but nurses seem to be able to reach them when necessary, and they seem to know what's going on, and show up when needed.
Bottom line: the healthcare companies would help patients more by diverting fancy building, artwork, advertising, etc. funds into hiring more RNs, patient techs, and doctors.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 03 2018, @01:51PM (21 children)
Governmental policy has transformed insurance companies into quasi-socialist political creatures that form a special-purpose, black-box payment network where the consumers have no idea what anything costs, and where doctors are in danger of losing their careers if they don't order every goddamn test in the literature.
Next, government requires hospitals to run the ER protocol for anyone who shows up to the emergency room, even when it's that same damn schizophrenic hypochondriac every day. If you walk into the ER with a cold, you have to be treated.
Socialistic governmental policies are what have turned the health care industry into yet another increasingly dysfunctional breadline.
(Score: 3, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday August 03 2018, @02:17PM (20 children)
There's some truth to what you say but that doesn't cover the breadth of the problems in the healthcare industry even by half.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday August 03 2018, @03:05PM (19 children)
Absolutely correct.
I wonder: if the "healthcare system" in the US was pretty much socialist, would it work much better? As it stands, it's a complex web of sharply delineated rules and gotchas significantly more complex than IRS. My cynical view is that govt. divisions keep it going to justify their existence and make their $ and have their little empires of bureaucracy. Meanwhile people lose huge $ and family fortunes because diseases are not treated, they get worse, the people involved suffer, get sicker, eventually die needlessly, yet it still all has to be paid for. How about if the person dies due to ANY thing or person who impedes treatment, you don't get paid? How about the sicker you get due to the system, the less you get paid? How about we (USA) look at countries where the system works and we just do that?
Forgive me, as I've written earlier, my poor mom is very ill so I'm seeing the inefficiency and mess directly. Right now she's in hospital and needs to go directly to SNF. BUT, she also needs a potentially life-saving treatment that's considered "outpatient", so she can't get that AND be "inpatient" in a hospital or SNF. Oh, some, including Medicare, will tell you it can happen, but all hospital and SNF care coordinators / social workers say that someone won't get paid. I've seen them refuse treatment because of it.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday August 03 2018, @03:23PM (7 children)
I'd rather skip the socialist bits. I haven't put a whole lot of thought into the matter but I'm absolutely certain it can be done a hell of a lot more efficiently without government involvement and the always accompanying corruption lending a hand. Pretty much anything can.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday August 03 2018, @03:47PM (3 children)
As always, I completely agree. The optimist in me thinks somehow good people would run such a progressive system. Trouble is: we're running out of good people.
Maybe that's it: how can we get the system set up and staffed by good people only? No time to think about it...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 03 2018, @05:20PM (2 children)
Damn boi, you just some shill account here to prop up The Might Buzzard's failing ideology? Wonder if he realizes what you're up to or if he thinks you're just a *swell* guy.
(Score: 3, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday August 04 2018, @01:41AM
I told him I'd spring for the hookers at the next SN staff meeting if he agreed with me for a month.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Monday August 06 2018, @05:16AM
I like TMB's hooker answer better than mine, which is: I'm more open-minded than most people. If there's anything I can't stand it's idiots who are militantly sure of themselves, no matter what it is they believe in. TMB is brilliant and has shared his experiences and how he has been on both sides of most (all?) major issues. He learns. It's called wisdom. Of course, we all have our view from our path in life. I see and understand the strong arguments and positions people have on most major issues. I think any sane rational person would realize there are no simple easy answers to anything in society. And for sure all the overly strong opinions, bickering, fighting, rioting, etc., are not helping solve anything.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 03 2018, @06:07PM
The facts (e.g. statistics from other countries) do not agree with you.
But why let that stop you? You are just here to stir of shit to get more engagement on the site, right?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 03 2018, @08:20PM (1 child)
And yet all the existing better systems have strong government involvement in the form of single payer. In spite of your certainty, no one has hit on the better system without gov involvement, so it's high time you do put a whole lot of thought into the matter and show us the way. Save us TMB, you're our only hope!
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday August 04 2018, @01:45AM
Why? My healthcare's free and costs nobody a dime worth of tax money, assuming I'm bothered enough to drive six hundred miles to use it. You have an arguably functional brain, use it. Assume every idea is shit until you find one that you cannot improve upon. Pro-tip: not having to take money from others without their consent is an improvement over having to.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 03 2018, @03:36PM (10 children)
The government isn't to blame for your problems, it is the insurance industry and the for-profit healthcare industry. I realize this goes against the Libertarian fantasy of angelic men and businesses that strictly follow optimal financial processes.
There is no cure for this insanity no matter how many examples of businesses going bad and ripping people off. There is a reason most other western nations have socialized medicine and have better health outcomes.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 03 2018, @04:28PM (8 children)
That's why Socialism always collapses into dysfunctional breadlines and "re-education" gulags.
Capitalism (libertarianism), in contrast, explicitly acknowledges the existence of soulless, self-serving psychopaths who are attracted to the levers and buttons of power. That's why capitalist society's are forever the most prosperous, because people don't trust monolithic organizations.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 03 2018, @05:55PM (3 children)
Your ideology is like the Luminiferous aether, sounds reasonable when you only know a little bit about the world and really stupid once you start understanding reality.
Capitalism sure does acknowledge the existence of socipaths and psychos, the only problem is that it REWARDS them! Do you even reality brah?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday August 04 2018, @01:48AM (2 children)
Socialism rewards them more. Or do you not see stealing from people with more than you without feeling guilty as a sociopathic tendency?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04 2018, @05:49PM (1 child)
Lol, projection!
Sociopaths have little to no empathy for others.
Let us see, i am suggesting single payer healthcare so no citizrn dies from an esdily treated issue. You are suggesting homeless and poor people should be unable to afford healthcare. In this scenario you are the sociopath no matter how you try and dress it up, you just try and hide behind the stupid phrase "taxation is theft!"
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday August 04 2018, @09:57PM
That's a nice strawman you have there. I haven't suggested anything at all during this discussion. I've just said your favorite idea is shit.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Friday August 03 2018, @06:04PM (3 children)
That's probably true except for the "forever" part. One thing that libertarianism fails to acknowledge is finite natural resources.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday August 04 2018, @01:49AM (2 children)
You mean like socialism fails to acknowledge finite piles of Other People's Money?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by shortscreen on Saturday August 04 2018, @08:54AM (1 child)
No, I meant like how socialism fails to acknowledge the existence of soulless, self-serving psychopaths who are attracted to the levers and buttons of power.
"Another View of Stalin" which was written by a communist, portrays Stalin as someone who was competent, devoted to the cause, and who ultimately accomplished a lot despite being constantly frustrated by saboteurs, external foes, and political opponents like Trotsky (a sore loser, the Soviet Union's Hillary). But he still got thrown under the bus at the end. So ironically, if you can believe this story it would seem to indicate that the system was pretty fragile and doomed to fail once it lost its great leader. The ambitious types were ready and waiting to take the reins for their own purposes.
Your quip about other people's money must be aimed at a peculiar definition of socialism. Worker control of the means of production doesn't require other people's money.
If you want to talk about growing economic parasites feeding on dwindling supplies of other peoples money, I think you would need to include the Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate sector, as well as the military-industrial complex and the government generally.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday August 04 2018, @10:01PM
It really doesn't matter how you portray one of the world's top five murderers in history.
Sure. I have no issue with including them in the discussion. There's plenty of fucked-up-edness all over the place and nobody gets a free pass on scrutiny.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday August 03 2018, @07:16PM
Sorry, but in a way the government is to blame. They set up the system enabling the insurance companies to take over the hospitals, and they manage it in such a was as to ensure that the insurance companies remain in control.
That said, I can't see a workable system that isn't run by government. Somethings really need to be or you suffer horrendous inefficiencies. Few people think a city should contract out it's police and fire fighters. Even fewer think it should be done by neighborhood associations with no governmental oversight. (And the ones who do are generally ideological fools.)
So I think that basic medical support should be run by the government in the same way that streets and other utilities are. And that optional extensions should be private. Just what the division should be is arguable, but definitely anything crucial to life should be part of basic...unless one wants to put an age limit on "when basic services are available". But those are precisely the people that a private system wouldn't want to care for, so that's an argument for "age related euthanasia for being poor". I'm not going to say it's not a valid position to take, but it's not a valid position to take without making your stance public.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 4, Informative) by ilPapa on Saturday August 04 2018, @03:20AM (7 children)
I agree with you that we need a simple single-payer system. Think of all the savings in paperwork.
I mean, if a little shithole country like...I don't know...every civilized country in the world can figure out health care, why is the United States so unable to pull it off? Could it possibly have something to do with regulatory capture and the unchecked power of corporations to influence government?
I've lived overseas, and you would be shocked at the countries in the world where you can walk into a doctors office and receive care and pay little or nothing. And yes, without waiting.
You are still welcome on my lawn.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday August 04 2018, @04:08AM (6 children)
I hate having to repeat myself but I suppose I will. It is not a binary decision. Your brain caught itself a fallacy. There are as many options as there are stars in the sky. Dealing with corruption in the current system in no way necessitates a single-payer system. And, no, I do not care if the entire world goes single-payer except us. Evil is evil and taking the fruits of their labor from others without their consent is evil.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04 2018, @04:31AM (1 child)
Increasingly, there is fundamental disagreement with the construction of the term labor that capitalism invented. It is the way a con man would construct the term labor to rationalize theft and slavery.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday August 04 2018, @10:02PM
Labor: human effort
That work for you?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by ilPapa on Saturday August 04 2018, @05:07AM (3 children)
So point to one that's been proven to work in large industrialized nations.
You are still welcome on my lawn.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday August 04 2018, @10:08PM (2 children)
Changing the goalposts, eh? I don't think so. The goal here's to find one that will work in the US that doesn't directly conflict with our system of values as a nation. That leaves every last European option out. Nice try though.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by ilPapa on Sunday August 05 2018, @03:34AM (1 child)
This "system of values" you speak of, does it include social security, medicare, an interstate highway system and public schools?
Funny story: did you know that more Americans have a positive opinion of socialism than they do of degenerate president Donald Trump?
You are still welcome on my lawn.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday August 05 2018, @10:35AM
Really? How'd that work out for Bernie?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 03 2018, @12:11PM (28 children)
Healthcare is a self serving business.
My wife showed early signs of pre-eclampsia, the OBs basically ignored them, said everythin' gonna' be alright just come in quick if you start going blind. Well, she started going blind and ended up in ICU for 2 weeks. The OBs called that a "good outcome" because the baby lived and mom didn't have a stroke. Tens of thousands of dollars of additional billable care, and two weeks of family trauma that could have been avoided with one extra office visit doesn't sound like a good outcome from our perspective, but it certainly is from the health care provider's business offices.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 03 2018, @01:54PM (1 child)
Maybe life just sucks and you got hit with the statistic this time.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Alfred on Friday August 03 2018, @02:06PM
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday August 03 2018, @02:21PM (25 children)
Unless they hold stock in the facility, the doctors working there have no financial incentive to rack up a bill. I expect they were either ordered to take up such a policy (which would be highly actionable) or you just got hit with a dipshit OB.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 03 2018, @02:26PM (10 children)
It's almost as though the doctors are being directed and managed by people who do hold stock in the hospital. I'm working on a conspiracy theory about this! I think I will call them "administrators" and "members of the board," though I have not yet decided if these are ranks of lizard person below the Red Dresses, or how they are using their massive profits from capitalist medicine to further the weather war.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday August 03 2018, @03:13PM (4 children)
After half a dozen hospital visits in the US, it will be crystal clear to anyone who pays attention that they put money 1st, patients and health a distant 2nd. Joe Merhcant's experience is all too common. They make a lot more money treating an emergency than doing a little extra prevention.
My own story: 10 years ago, while driving my parents around for a bit of shopping, I was in an auto accident. Kid ran a red light, right in front of me, and I T-boned him. Everyone's legs took a beating. Mom got a broken ankle, and just below the shins, Dad got a bad bruise on one leg and a cut on the other. The bruise did not heal like it should thanks to weak circulation, and he ended up returning to the hospital for that. They racked up some $20k in charges over a friggin bruise. Made a surgical cut to clear out the clots, then put this "wound vac" on the cut they had made to apply some suction to make it heal faster. That damned wound vac cost $1100 per week to rent, and we didn't find out about that until it was all over. The bastards had us keep the vac one more week, "just in case". Such a device ought to cost no more than $200 to buy. Yes, insurance cut that rental cost way down, but it was still outrageous.
Meanwhile, once they set Mom's ankle, the hospital transferred her to this private hospital for physical therapy. And when she was ready to be discharged, they had a nice little farewell "gift" for us. Those bastards ignored all my protestations that we had a friend who was willing to let us have their wheelchair, to push their own wheelchair on us. Gave us crap about how they couldn't guarantee a good outcome if we didn't use their approved devices. Before she was allowed out the door, with their wheelchair, they shoved a document under her nose for her to sign. It said that if insurance didn't pay for that wheelchair, we promised we would pay for it. $820 wheelchair, ka-ching!
The kicker? Dad's bruise would have healed just fine on its own if only he'd kept the leg elevated, known to keep it elevated, you know, like in some of those old depictions that show a person lying in bed, with one leg wrapped in bandages and held half a meter above the bed by a sling hooked to something up high.
That's hardly the only encounter I've had. It was the same thing all over for my own visit to emergency several years later. $300 for a $2 bag of saline solution, $20 for one pill of aspirin, and the usual bullcrap justification that they have to inflate prices like that to cover other expenses.
There are a lot of forces who like it the way it is. Ambulance chasing lawyers love it. The more cost the medics rack up, the more damages they can try to win, of which they get a huge cut, about 1/3. They will egg on the doctors, and who are the doctors to say no to more money, eh? Health insurance is supposed to fight this. Instead they've found it easier to bully patients into paying higher premiums and accepting less coverage.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday August 03 2018, @07:22PM (2 children)
That wasn't a $2 bag of saline solution. It needed to be sterile, special storage, etc. I'd guess that $50 would have been a fair price, but I don't know the details of handling and sterility requirements. And formulation. Still, they use a lot of them, so my guess is $50. For a one-off $200 would be extremely cheap...but it's not a one-off.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday August 04 2018, @01:37AM (1 child)
Medicare says a bag of saline solution is worth around $2. Just look for item code J7030. Further, how is it even Starbucks can serve hot coffee, a much more complicated brew, for far, far less money, and still profit?
What you said is exactly what they tried to use as excuses why it's so expensive. But sterilization is quite easy. Irradiate or heat it. it doesn't even have to be boiling, a mere 160F is hot enough. Storage is no big deal either.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday August 04 2018, @05:04PM
Well, for one thing, coffee is rarely kept sterile.
OTOH, the argument about the "official Medicare price" is an excellent counter to my guess. I still find $2 unbelievably cheap, but I guess if they use them in quantity it might be reasonable.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by dry on Saturday August 04 2018, @03:05AM
Meanwhile, I had to take a friend to emergency twice in the last year here in Canada, each time it cost $5 for parking.
The whole experience was rather good, considering my friend was dying. In to the cubicle where they take all the info by the time I finished parking, into a bed with an IV within another 15 minutes or so. The first time, they were busy so it was a bed in the hall for a couple of hours and he got moved around a bit much but the price was good. Operated on the next day in both cases, sent home about a week later and total cost was my $5 parking bill.
In his case, being on disability, all the pills he takes are free, otherwise after leaving the hospital, those medications would have added up without insurance. Canada has expensive drugs, second most expensive in the world I understand.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday August 03 2018, @03:23PM (4 children)
See above re: highly actionable
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 03 2018, @03:43PM (3 children)
See reality, private businesses do what they want. Unless you're suggesting regulation would solve that little problem ;)
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday August 04 2018, @01:51AM (2 children)
Take your own advice. Medical lawsuits are an enormous industry.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04 2018, @05:55PM (1 child)
You cant sue the hospital if they charge you high rstes, you should have "shopped around" better. I would lend you my clue bat but im worried it would turn on you and beat you to a pulp.
Maybe catch a ride on the plane as it soars over your head next time.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday August 04 2018, @10:10PM
Lost track of what we were talking about, didja? Reread and try again if you like.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 03 2018, @02:54PM (13 children)
The OBs working that office overbooked their practice, 7/8 scheduled pre-natal care visits would run late, like 2 and even 4 hours late, for all patients. They weren't just busy, they were physically and mentally exhausted by the middle of every practice day. They skimped on our scheduled care visits: specifically, after the pre-eclampsia scare they told us to reschedule our visits to delete one because we had come in for the post-scare followup since, between the 4 of them they hadn't managed to return phone messages for 48 hours. The rescheduling led to a 10 day gap between visits when standard of care was 7 days between visits, and on day 8 we had to come in for emergency C-section, ICU, etc.
No, they weren't specifically "out to get us" and put mom in the ICU. They were, however, maximizing their income and skimping on standard of care as a direct result - both in the scheduling and in their ability to effectively manage their patients' healthcare needs, and those factors did directly contribute to our emergency situation. If we had gotten any kind of office visit on day 7, the urine and BP tests would have clearly shown the pre-eclampsia before it presented as blindness. It didn't help that their office staff were basically human shields for them, painting their nails instead of answering incoming calls for healthcare related followups, scheduling, etc.
When baby 2 was on the way I told mom: "you can go back to those bitches if you want, it's your body" (practice was 4 female OBs) "but I'm not setting foot in their offices again, if you go to them you go alone." We found a less popular OB who gave us much better care, never late for appointments, always mentally sharp when we were there, etc. Delivery 2 went 100% as planned, no events - until the post-birth blood test gave us a false positive for HIV on Friday afternoon, with no ability to confirm that it was a false until Monday - f'ing Texas law requires the test and requires informing the patient immediately, even though there's a massively high false positive rate. If you think about the heightened emotions surrounding the whole thing, I'm sure there's been more than one bad thing happen for no good reason as a result of that stupid law. MD's could surely have sat on those results for 72 hours until we got a confirmation.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday August 03 2018, @03:27PM (12 children)
Sounds like someone running their business poorly then. Would be nice if it were easy to check things like quality of care and shop around.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 03 2018, @03:41PM (7 children)
You realize there isn't some magical aspect to private business that let's people shop around right? Large hospitals aren't required to rip people off and not display common pricing. That is an effect of private money grubbing assholes not government regulation.
If you bring up ER mandates, well then that is just your typical FYGM attitude.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday August 04 2018, @01:53AM (6 children)
You realize that when competition is viable, there absolutely is a magical aspect that lets people shop around. Whoever provides the best service for the lowest cost gets the customers, so it behooves new entrants to do so.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Informative) by ilPapa on Saturday August 04 2018, @03:28AM (5 children)
No. The whole "shopping for health care" is a myth. If your kid is diagnosed with leukemia, you're not going to be shopping to find the best price on treatment. When your aging parent is receiving end-of-life care, you are unlikely to try to negotiate with the hospital for a better price.
There was a time when corporate profits were not part of the health care industry in the United States. When people talk about "going back to having good health care", they're thinking of that time. Anyone who's been alive since the 70s can tell you how the entire health care industry started going downhill when for-profit entities started taking over.
At long last, we have to accept the data: universal, single-payer health care is the only system that works now. There are no exceptions.
You are still welcome on my lawn.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday August 04 2018, @04:16AM (4 children)
Less than three miles from where I sit there is a cash-only urgent care clinic. It always has patient vehicles in front of it. It posts prices for its most common services on a menu in the lobby.
And don't try to speak for me. You're extremely inept at it.
"A flaw was found with your system so you must abandon it in favor of this specific system that I like!"
You're not an idiot. Stop arguing like one.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Touché) by ilPapa on Saturday August 04 2018, @05:05AM (3 children)
Your urgent care center will not be able to treat your kid's leukemia or provide your aging parent's end-of-life care. It's for handing out antibiotics and stitching up little league accidents.
You are still welcome on my lawn.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday August 04 2018, @10:11PM (2 children)
Pay attention here, slappy. I am not proposing this as a solution to all healthcare issues the nation over. Or was that intentional strawmaning?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by ilPapa on Sunday August 05 2018, @03:36AM (1 child)
So then why introduce the topic into a discussion of the health care system?
You are still welcome on my lawn.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday August 05 2018, @10:38AM
Because something does not need to be a complete solution to be useful. This was me being helpful to you poor schlubs whose healthcare isn't 100% paid for without stealing anyone's hard earned money.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 03 2018, @05:14PM (3 children)
IMO it was obvious from the 3rd office visit where we had to wait 3+ hours past our scheduled appointment time, but they were sooooo popular and highly recommended. They definitely were running their MEDICAL PRACTICE poorly, as a business they were going gangbusters.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday August 04 2018, @01:54AM (2 children)
Don't see how. You'd think people would be word-of-mouth-ing them out of business, what with this Internet thing and all.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday August 04 2018, @03:00AM (1 child)
2001, not so much Yelping going on at the time. Also: if you recall Outback steakhouse and similar chains that would make you wait a minimum of 30 minutes for a table even when the place was empty, and 90+ minutes during normal dinner hours, if they're that much in demand they must be awesome, right? Had to get lucky just to get accepted by them, can't let it go after you've been honored like that. Fucking idiot psychology, and it works because.....
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday August 04 2018, @04:16AM
Ahhh, roger.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 03 2018, @12:29PM (17 children)
One hospital I worked with had two sides of every hallway: one side with doctors, nurses and patients, and across the hall was all billing and administration - fully 50% of the square footage devoted to processing the billing, and they were falling behind on the billing work.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Informative) by ilPapa on Saturday August 04 2018, @03:30AM (16 children)
Just think how much better things would be if we took insurance companies out of the system entirely and went to single-payer, or at least Medicare-for-all.
You are still welcome on my lawn.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday August 04 2018, @04:18AM (15 children)
Dude, you say single-payer one more time and Europe is going to start charging you royalties.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 5, Touché) by ilPapa on Saturday August 04 2018, @05:04AM (1 child)
It would be cheaper paying the royalties than paying for health care in the US.
You are still welcome on my lawn.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday August 04 2018, @10:12PM
Good one. +1 Funny.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday August 04 2018, @01:11PM (12 children)
From my experience (and my best friend from college who moved to Germany after graduation) whatever they might charge would be a bargain. Shit just works in their healthcare system, it's not perfect in every way, but for what the vast majority of the people need it's 1000% better than our gun-to-your-head "free market" pricing
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday August 04 2018, @10:14PM (11 children)
Right but it's not a binary choice. There's most assuredly more than one way to skin this cat. Figure out something that works with capitalism instead of against it and you'll get nationwide support.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday August 06 2018, @09:52PM (10 children)
Sounds like something from a doe-eyed naive optimist... What is capitalist? What is communist? Sure, there are good academic definitions, but what actually works for the public perception? From my cynical view: whatever the media and their puppets feed the public. In my (sad) view, with the right spin doctors and sufficient funding a bold new president with the same basic agenda as Mao Tse Tung could be sold to the American people as the savior of capitalism, small private businesses, Mom and apple pie, all the while setting up effectively state controlled vertical monopolies.
There's been a little press splash recently about "Bernie's Medicare for all." Which reminds me of a quiet little press blurb about Trump during his first months in office asking Medicare... "why can't we just give that to everyone...?" Fox News is highlighting how it will cost 26 Trillion dollars over some meaningless arbitrary timeframe, while other outlets are pointing out that it could save 2-3 Trillion as compared to business as usual. They're both using BS estimates taken from dubious data collected with people with agendas to push, but... spin that right and it could happen.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday August 06 2018, @10:03PM (9 children)
Nah, I'm not saying you won't have to put any effort into selling it but your job will be considerably easier with an offer more in line with American values. Selling socialism to people who historically despise taxes and believe in earning your own way in the world is going to be far more difficult than coming up with a plan that works hand-in-hand with how things are here though.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday August 06 2018, @10:31PM (8 children)
I'm all for that, except that we've let the Med-Biz snakes out of control for too many decades running, they've got a gun to every sick person's head and a horizontal monopoly running from coast to coast, Rio Grande to the 49th parallel.
You can't get simple healthcare without signing into a subscription insurance system that wants $500K per head every 30 years, so you can have the privilege of paying over-inflated copays that are more than the whole cost of care should be in the first place. The latest ripoff are HSAs where you get to pay out of pocket for their imaginary prices until you reach some 5-10K per head annual deductible, in addition to your insurance premiums. Don't want to pay insurance premiums? O.K. fine, we'll take your bill, multiply it by 10 and then let you have a 10% "cash discount" how's that? Don't like it? Well, you could always just let the cancer kill your self, or your child. Maybe you've got a heart condition... oooooh goody, you've got to pay whatever we're charging when you present at the cath lab - sure we can save you, multiple times, but somebody's going to be paying for a new Porsche every time you get saved...
I know you've got some cash doctors out in Oklahoma who are bucking the trend. Good for them, it's one way to fight the power, but it's not effective and it's not going to spread out to be able to serve even 0.1% of the national population anytime soon.
So, however it gets sold, I'd appreciate it if it could bring the juggernaut back at least half way to earth before I'm dead. All the politicians have done for the last 20 years is acknowledge it's a problem that needs addressing, and demonstrate how incapable they are of addressing it, while it spins further and further out of control. Of course, I should be careful what I wish for, I've got nearly 30 years experience in the med device business, we sell expensive widgets that make healthcare more effective and ultimately cheaper, but if you pull the cost cutting lever too hard, the expensive widgets business will dry up overnight.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday August 07 2018, @10:44AM (7 children)
Um, you know HSAs are your money, right? It's just a bank account that you can stick untaxed income into that, if used for healthcare, never gets taxed. Now you can draw whatever you want out of it whenever you want, you just have to pay the taxes you previously avoided on it if it's not going for healthcare. That's not a ripoff, that's a tax break.
Maybe, maybe not. It seems like it followed me to TN at least, so who knows what the future holds.
See, there's the thing that confuses me. When precisely was this golden age where people could afford all the healthcare they'd ever want in the US? They currently use the complete fuck out of it compared to when I was growing up. I mean, taking your kid to the doctor with a fever under 103F? Why the hell would anyone even bother with that? It's not life-threatening and will be gone in a week or less. Plus there's fuck-all a doctor can do about it aside from tell them to get plenty of rest, drink lots of fluids, take an aspirin or ibuprofen as appropriate for their age for the fever, and come back in if it gets higher.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday August 07 2018, @12:02PM (6 children)
Of course it's "my" money - my money to spend in their company store, at their rates. If they had rolled HSAs out 30 years ago, we'd have $50K saved in them by now, but they didn't, and at our ages the basic preventative maintenance visits generate a couple thousand a year in HSA draining bills. As for "it's a tax break" - that's weak tea... taxes are whatever they're decided to be. Making medical expenses a tax break is just one more way of feeding the beast that is the healthcare industry. What HSAs really are (as implemented at my company, this year) is another way to extract money for medical care by calling it "your money" but only if you spend it on healthcare will you get this tax break on it. The use-it-or-lose-it schemes of the last decade were even more blatant about it, but it's the same game. If you go uninsured, see how far your HSA dollars will go when you walk into a provider's office without a "I (or my company) have paid my $10K+ premiums this year so you've got to charge me a lower rate for your services" card.
Sometime in the 1950s - 70s, you could present at an ER with something like a broken arm or needing a few stitches and get out with decent care for less than a week's wages. My 2010 ER visit presented a bill for $6000 for essentially nothing beyond an antibiotic script and a 5 minute MD consult - it really did look like blood poisoning at 4pm, the 6+ hours sitting in the TB ward (aka waiting room) waiting to be seen made it clear enough that it was something else so I should have walked out, but they had already taken blood and run X-rays so why not go ahead and look the doc in the eye when he says "it's nothing, here's a script for the puss-fingernail." To repeat the story, in 1990 I really did have blood poisoning, the red stripe was getting longer and redder by the minute, and that got taken care of quickly and efficiently by an MD and nurse at an ER in Dusseldorf, they spent an hour cleaning the wound, setting a plaster cast, getting the drugs together including a tetanus series, and generally taking better care of the situation than I have EVER seen done in the for-profit ERs of the US. That was 2 person hours spent caring for the actual problem, not 30 minutes of a billing officer's time, 15 minutes of an intake receptionist's time, 20 minutes of an Xray tech's time, 15 minutes of a phlebotomist's time, 5 minutes of a radiologists' time, 10 minutes of the blood analysts' time, 60+ minutes of general administrative time shuffling paper/data between these people and my chart/billing tally, me having to drive across town to find an open pharmacy, 5 minutes of the pharmacist's time, and 5 minutes of the doc's time to look at it and say "yup, if it were a problem it would be worse by now." IF IT WAS A FUCKING PROBLEM IT WOULD BE AN AMPUTATION BY NOW YOU GOD DAMNED ASSHOLE... that's the whole reason I didn't just go to bed and see how it looked in the morning, but on a Sunday evening at 4:30pm there's no place in town but the ER to go, and during NFL playoffs apparently this ER doesn't take patients back to see the docs when the Patriots are playing.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday August 07 2018, @01:19PM (5 children)
Okay, a HSA means you can now get a tax break on healthcare expenses that you previously could not; or you can pull all the money out, pay taxes on it like you would have had to anyway, and buy yourself a bass boat. There's not an actual down side there, so I don't get the animosity. It's not a fantastic solution to all the world's woes but it's not a bad thing either.
Yes, and if you had most of the diseases we have a simple cure or treatment for nowadays, you were just going to die and there was nothing anyone could do about it. Most of our insanely expensive diagnostic equipment hadn't even been invented back then either. Rapid advancement must be paid for and it's been the US doing most of the paying while the rest of the world simply reaps the benefits for quite some time. I wouldn't mind changing that even a little bit but Europe would fucking riot and Africa would just have to suffer and die.
It's not all on advancement though. Insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, medical equipment manufacturers, trial lawyers, and politicians have all had a hand in fucking up healthcare for the unwashed masses and that needs to be corrected. But it only needs to be corrected as far as is necessary to undo the corruption and graft. People need to be able to tell whether the advancement they're getting is pricing healthcare out of their reach and to do that we need to eliminate the other unwarranted cost inflationary variables.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday August 07 2018, @05:44PM (4 children)
In the relative world of healthcare payments, no, it's on the mild end of the scale. Still, what it is doing is allowing you to dodge taxes by spending money in the healthcare system. I'd like to bake bread for a living, wouldn't it be nice if everyone could get a tax break when they set money aside and use it to buy my bread? Let's set that up so that the high cost of my bread isn't as painful for everyone. Just a god-damned handout to the industry, IMO.
I'm sorry, what, exactly has improved in the longevity prognosis in the U.S. from 1970 to today? What percentage of people are being "saved" by "simple" cures or treatments that didn't exist 50 years ago? Progress, yes. Worth the relative increase in expense which is now passing 20% of GDP? Hardly.
I'm all for progress, I've spent 20 years getting educated and 30 years working toward progress, and the pay's pretty damned good. However... the way that progress is being paid for is so utterly perverse... switch to single payer, take the 3 Trillion in annual savings and plow that straight into research grants, spend half of it chasing down and curtailing waste, graft and corruption, and there can still be significant, and even better, progress. Progress that's not directed at dependency and chronic care, progress that improves lives first and bottom lines - maybe never, do we really care if this progress is improving corporate profits?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday August 08 2018, @01:39AM (3 children)
That only works if HSAs incentivize spending more on healthcare. They don't. They just make the ass pain of doing so slightly less on the person having to spend it.
Oh, a pretty large one. Consider AIDS. Or the HPV vaccine. Or Hep C now being curable. Or all the nifty toys we now have to find problems before you die of "heart failure" or "natural causes". Now is that level of care worth what it costs to deliver it? That's why I'd like to pare the costs down to something without graft and corruption; so that we can tell.
And you think this will help, why? The US bears the majority of research costs and we do not fix prices for new, expensive treatments. This is the primary reason why US healthcare costs more than EU healthcare, not single payer. Primary, not only. There's plenty of other things going on. Many of them need to stop. Some of them need to be modified.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday August 08 2018, @04:44AM (2 children)
Oh, c'mon mr. conservative: AIDS is for faggot junkies, God's punishment don't you know? ( /s - yes, it's a big one, but hardly what your healthcare insurance has been funding). As for HPV: yeah, that's nice, except that anybody who got annual pap smears could also get one of three simple surgeries to stop the cancer that occasionally shows up from HPV infection. The vaccine is reducing death rates among those who weren't following the existing guidelines, so, progress, but hardly worth everyone working an extra 5 years before retirement for.
Cardiac interventions are a big one that healthcare insurance has been funding, and they have made a huge difference in mortality rates, I know several walking solid ghosts thanks to the advances of the last 20 years, none of them are exactly productive members of society since their reprieve from the reaper, but they have enjoyed about half of their gifted years. As they approach their 70s they, and the people who care for them, would arguably be better off if they had died already. Same could be said of my grandfather who passed in 1991, he was supposed to be dead by 1970, but there was always a new pill that seemed to keep him going, he made a conscious choice, against medical advice, to deny them permission to amputate his leg to save his life - sad that he had to leave us at 74 years old, but far happier memories of him than what we're getting from our cath-lab saved folks today in their 70s.
Everybody would, but, then, what's graft or corruption? Do you count the cardiologist that UC Santa Barbara wanted to attract to their facility so they installed two 3T MRI machines they didn't have a business need for just so he could do some flow studies that tickled his fancy, then he left after less than 2 years and left them with $10M of money losing equipment in their basement? Is that graft, corruption, or just a perverse waste of money? IMO single payer would make detection and intervention of graft and corruption simpler and more efficient, but no matter what system you have, there will always be some overhead cost associated with keeping people from wasting/stealing money, or letting them waste/steal some money to save on monitoring/accounting costs.
Yes, democratic free market that we are, let's take a poll of the people and ask: do you really want to pay 5x for your healthcare costs your entire life to fund these research treatments that you're likely to be denied when you need them because you still can't afford them? What percentage of our people do you think really want this? What real choices are out there in the market for them? It's a complicit monopoly worse than anything the Rockefellers cooked up 100 years ago. I have never had more than 3 competitive healthcare plans to choose from, and two of the choices have been pumped up straw men with premiums jacked up to more than cover any possible increased coverage. Then there's the choice to dump your employer's healthcare plan and try to get your own - which is no option at all because that's a high multiple of premium for worse benefits - yet another successful lock-in choice elimination strategy that's been working for decades.
It's almost a parody of the cryogenic preservation market - convince the rich and powerful that you've got some interesting life extending technology, but instead of having them fund it from their own pockets, twist the costs of it around onto as much of the general population as you can, including research and experimental treatments. A coworker of mine in Houston contracted deadly cancer at age 45 (Houston, who'da thunk it?) and he was pretty chill and Zen about the whole deal, spending more time with his family and hand making his fly-fishing rods and lures, until one day about 3 months before he died, some asshole out of MD Anderson put a bug in his ear about "fighting this thing" and convinced him to spend his last three months in agony being a test subject for experimental therapy which not only killed him faster than zero therapy was predicting he would have had, but also wiped out his net worth and put his surviving family (wife, three kids) $200K in debt before he passed. Real progress, that is. Similarly, bought firewood from some yokels in Alabama, they told a tale of how daddy was hospitalized for a few months before he died and now the hospital is claiming the family land in court - land that had been in the family since the 1800s, given to the hospital for a few months of "care." We looked at a trailer in Marathon Florida, similar story: owned by the hospital because the owner spent a few months getting "end of life care" before he expired altogether. Fucking vampires, preying on people who make very different decisions than they would have for 99% of their life. And they've been spreading their reach into the younger and healthier pocketbooks through revision after refinement after revision of the insurance structures, billing inflations, etc.
I do remember, my brother had one of the early billing insanities for a hospital visit in 1981 or so, there was a $74 dollar charge on the bill for a trach tube - except he never had a tracheotomy, just an "honest" mistake, yeah, right next to the $5 tylenol pill, and, yes, I understand the reasoning for that $5 pill, but can we please just have a line item for "overhead" or "bed charge" without loading the crap into every single thing done for a patient? In 2001 my wife spent those two weeks in ICU and the bill came back $30K, in 2010 a colleague of mine's wife had the same basic experience - pre-eclampsia, two weeks ICU, but their bill came back $80K from a "cheaper" hospital.
Out of control describes where we were in the 1990s, where we are today is almost like the industry is taunting the population, daring them to dust off the guillotines and have a bloody revolution in the streets. Medical research: yes. 3600 Billion on US healthcare vs 30 Billion on US public/private space exploration? Missing the big picture, I'd say.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday August 08 2018, @11:57AM (1 child)
Not a conservative. Proper liberal (liberal not progressive or Democrat) here, thanks.
We're nothing even remotely similar to a free market. Preferential or anti-competitive legislation is the one thing you're not supposed to be able to buy in a free market and we sell it like nickel beer.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday August 08 2018, @12:48PM
My condolences - certain assumptions were made based on your geographic references... still, based on those geographic experiences you surely have met the kind of attitudes which I was referring to.
Our democracy that is not a democracy, which promotes a free market which is anything but free... straight in line with the conservative mindset of: do as I say, not as I have done or continue to do.
I don't know if it's a shame that we lie to our children or not, it is certainly a shame in my mind that so many conservative adults continue to lie to themselves.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 03 2018, @12:51PM (1 child)
I'm afraid you've got the analysis here wrong. You sound like a socialist incel to me.
What's really going on here is that there is a giant conspiracy among all medical personnel assigned the male gender at birth to murder women. They do it because they hate women because they can't get laid.
There is only one way to solve this problem. We must elect Hillary Clinton in 2020.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday August 03 2018, @02:23PM
Doctors have no problem getting laid. Money has always been a pretty strong aphrodisiac. The bean counters though, there you may be on to something.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.