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from the But-I-*like*-getting-50-different-invoices-for-one-hospital-stay dept.
There is an instinct among political pundits to confuse caution for practicality — an assumption that those who advocate for incremental change are being reasonable, while those pushing for bold reforms aren’t. This is seen most starkly in the debate around health care reform, despite the fact that the “practical” pushers of limited reform fail to address the real problems in our health care system.
We all recognize that the status quo isn’t working. We spend more per person than any other country on health care, but we aren’t getting any bang for our buck. We have lower life expectancy, higher infant mortality rates and more preventable deaths, and too many personal bankruptcies are due at least in part to medical bills.
[...]Time to get real. As an economist who has spent decades studying our health care system, I can tell you that Medicare for All advocates are the only ones who are being reasonable, because theirs is the only plan that will control health care costs while finally achieving universal coverage.
The problem with incremental plans, whether they are public options, buy-ins to Medicare or Medicaid, or pumping more money into subsidies in the Affordable Care Act's individual marketplace, is that they preserve the private health insurance system weighing down our health care. [...]they are leaving the main reason for our system’s dysfunction in place: the multipayer, for-profit financing model.
Commercial insurance companies are nothing more than middle men. They add no value to our system, but they do drive up costs with their bloated claims departments, marketing and advertising budgets and executive salaries. We pay for all of these things before a single dollar is spent on the delivery of care.
They also create extra costs for providers who need large administrative staffs to deal with billing systems, accounting for as much as $100,000 per physician.
Any plans short of Medicare for All leaves these costs in place. In other words, they leave hundreds of billions of dollars a year in savings on the table.
[...]Gerald Friedman, a health care and labor economist, is an economics professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst and the director of The Hopbrook Institute.
[Related]:
Democrats' promise of Medicare for All is remarkably misguided and unrealistic
Trump wants to drop a neutron bomb on Obamacare. Over to you, 2020 voters.
Take it from me, tweaks won't fix health care. Dems should focus on Medicare for All.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 09 2019, @02:06PM (8 children)
Because it takes a doctor's training to determine whether a blood test or scan is even needed, and to interpret the results of those tests properly. The Internet is full of bullshit, you know, and ordinary people have no way to filter out the bullshit and quacks from the real thing.
And how are you supposed to tell whether someone's label is truthful or is a pack of lies? That's why doctors have licenses (which are essentially those kinds of labels, but backed up by the state), and why it is illegal to practise medicine without one.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 09 2019, @02:13PM (3 children)
Source? From my experience, doctors rarely know what they are talking about or how to interpret data. Some studies indicate that 90+% of them are misinterpreting all their test results:
https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/context/doctors-flunk-quiz-screening-test-math [sciencenews.org]
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Tuesday April 09 2019, @02:43PM (2 children)
"From my experience, doctors rarely know what they are talking about"
I take your point, but it's not quite that bad. For common things that doctors see over and over again, they are pretty good. Certainly better than self-diagnosis via the Internet.
For unusual things, not so much. In the end, we don't really understand these biological systems that we're wearing. They're hugely complicated, and sometimes seem to work (or not work) more by happenstance than anything else. I had a weird health problem a few years ago, landed in the emergency room (twice), had test after test after test. In the end, the doctors threw up their hands, "well, you seem fine now, maybe try taking some vitamin B, who knows...". That's not the fault of the docs, really, it's our general lack of understanding.
""If a test to detect a disease whose prevalence is 1 out of 1,000 has a false positive rate of 5 percent, what is the chance that a person found to have a positive result actually has the disease?" only 14 gave the correct answer"
Statistics are hard. Medical personnel are hardly alone in that. But that's why they have their algorithms and checklists. If the test is that unreliable, there is almost certainly a checklist that says "if positive result from test X, then do test Y to confirm."
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 09 2019, @02:51PM
Like Richard Feynman said, if you are sick in the jungle you would rather a witch doctor came across you than a random person. At least they have experience dealing with the ill.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 09 2019, @05:27PM
For those things, the educated layman wouldn't be so bad either.
(Score: 0, Informative) by khallow on Tuesday April 09 2019, @02:28PM (3 children)
That's an argument from authority. No, it doesn't.
Talk to their patients.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 09 2019, @04:13PM (1 child)
It's not an argument from authority, you may question the quality of medical training, but those doctors have at least been through medical school then been supervised during residency and can lose their licenses if they're incompetent. Not to mention malpractice lawsuits.
The medical school education still has limits, but it's mostly because the ability to conduct research is limited by ethics rules. In the future, that will change as scientists learn how to create our own organs that can be used to directly test medications and treatments on without the ethical problems.
Joe Blow, even with the most accurate of medical text libraries, is not likely to be anywhere near as accurate in treatment. And if you don't trust the result, you can always get a second opinion from another doctor.
But, to suggest that this is merely an argument to authority is rather misleading, there is research that goes into this and that research is in continual development. Arguing that it's just because these people are experts is ignorant.
But then again, as a founding member of the ignoranti, you're hardly out of character here.
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Tuesday April 09 2019, @04:56PM
Sorry, the argument from authority continues. The obvious rebuttal to this nonsense is that nurses and a fair number of lab techs also have the necessary training. As to the last two items on your list, a person reviewing blood tests no matter what sort of license or lack thereof, they might have, is still subject to malpractice lawsuits.
Joe Blow doesn't have to be.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 09 2019, @08:12PM
When it comes time for your lobotomy, may I do it? I call dibs.