Bernie got you covered here with free college. Maybe free med school, too? Get more people who are interested and capable of providing healthcare into the profession without piling on a ton of debt, then maybe there will be more supply and competition in the healthcare field and the physicians/nurse would still come out even or ahead overall. I wonder how much healthcare $ in the U.S. are going to pay insurance company overhead and doctors/nurses student loans. Bottom line: There are a number of other countries who seem to be better at this than we are-- lower cost, better health outcome. Maybe look at what they do? I mean, we'd expect a perpetual 30-win NBA team to try and learn from more successful teams, no?
Yea this is stupid, medicare reimbursement is already ****ing physicians over. The only profession in the world where you are expected to work for free.
Making med school free doesn't fix totally fix the problem. We need more med schools and easier access so there are more doctors and more nurses. We also need to change who can provide health care. It's silly that I have to go to the doctor for basic prescriptions like allergy.
You don't have to go see a doctor to get allergy prescriptions. Antihistamines and now, nasal corticosteroids are available OTC. Medical schools are not the problem, it's residency spots. You can't practice without a residency. Residents carry a bulk of the medical care in this country on slave labor and wages paid through medicare. We already get screwed there, no need for it later on. I was lucky enough to goto med. school in Texas. Cheapest in the country to the point people paying out of state tuition would still save a lot of $$. I know people that come out with half a million in debt. The fix isn't as simple as making health care free for everybody. Not to mention, if you ever want to see government run healthcare in this country, goto the VA...a level of dysfunctionality that only people that have ever set foot in on can fathom.
It's not government run health care, it's government insurance for health care. They're not the same things. There's not going to be some new gubmint hospital in every city, it's going to be all of the existing medical infrastructure reimbursed by the government.
contacts legally require a prescription that needs to be renewed routinely. I always found this absurd. how can you abuse contacts? I would guess 80% of optometrist's business comes from this legal requirement. If it didn't exist anyone could just go to any regular Joe without a med license and he could do the 'which is better? 1 or 2?' jargon and write down my needed curvature for like $5.
Yea I was going through this BS just the other day. Certain people shouldn't wear contacts though, and certain things like corneal ulcers can cause serious eye damage/blindness. Not to be picky, but optometrists don't have medical licenses, that's why they can't prescribe medications. For the majority of your prescriptions, you should have to see a physician though as frustrating as it sounds. Good thing is, for NSAIDs, Allergy medications etc you don't.
I see your point, but the whole reason the healthcare system is designed the way it is, is for contracting with insurance companies. Contracting with uncle sam invariably puts the government in the seat. Our healthcare system is stupid though.
The government is already in that seat with Medicare and despite your "slave labor and wages" comment, Medicare recipients love the way Medicare works. Medicare leverages its number of patients as it should to get costs down. Our current health care system is designed to maximize profits to the detriment of the public. Anyone that has read an insurance statement knows the ridiculous sums of money that the health care system charges insurance companies. So there are several challenges in a Medicare for all proposal but the most important of all is the ridiculous sums of money that the health care system charges insurance and how to cut the profit expectation at every step in that chain. Health care needs to a non-profit entity. Once you get that solved, then you can move forward.
Why start more med schools like suckers when we can just just import more immigrant doctors? or we can just go the traditional medicine route: http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/theodoric-of-york/n8661
See that's where you're wrong. I'm also not coming from a point of bullsheet lol, I've done medical billing. For starters, a lot of hospitals barely break even with Medicare. It is great for recipients yes, but providers (the ones who really get shafted) don't get much out of it. Hard to get people to work ridiculous hours, perform difficult high risk procedures that put yourself in a ton of liability, to get shafted like that. Private insurance tends to even it out. On the second point, the reason those exorbitant charges are displayed is that the insurance company never pays that amount. Things are routinely over-billed because the "allowed" sum is usually much much smaller, usually a fraction. This works in favor of the insurance company because not only will it not pay that amount, there is no way an individual could fit that cost on his/her own and is forced to purchase insurance. So no, in the end it really isn't the crazy sums that the health-care system charges insurance companies. Medicare just shafts the system worse due to it's "because uncle sam says.." rule. This also doesn't address one of the biggest costs in healthcare, medical devices and the pharmaceutical industry. Reigning those entities is extremely difficult.
I see the amount my insurance company is billed and how much it pays. I get an EOB every month. I've seen how much Medicare is billed and how much it pays. Insurance, for the same service, can pay 5 to 6 times more for the same services from what I've seen in comparison of private insurance and Medicare. It's a game that the entire system plays with itself but we see how much they pay. The pharma industry is in the same for profit boat. They charge exorbitant prices because they can get away with it. Even in Medicare prescription drugs, the government does not leverage its user base against pharma prices the way they do in Medicare services so pharma actually gets even more rip off prices than the rest of the health care apparatus. How is an elderly person on a social security income supposed to afford 2k in drugs every month? Seriously. The entire health care industry is siphoning off tens of billions of dollars in profit from the American public to the country's detriment.
I generally disagree with you 99.9999% of the time. Healthcare is not something large swaths of people should be getting wealthy off of. If a hospital is barely getting by on Medicare, then they are getting by just enough. I understand people need to get paid for their talents and they rightfully should. There is too much greed in our healthcare system at the expense of our population. We shouldn't be paying 10x the cost of healthcare compared to lesser developed countries simply because many of us can afford it.
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/875356 Medicare patients admitted to the hospital and treated by internists who graduated from medical schools outside the United States had lower 30-day mortality than matched patients cared for by graduates of US schools, according to results of a study published online today in the British Medical Journal (BMJ).
That doesn't discount what I've said in any way... doesn't matter which medical school you went to when you have to complete a U.S residency to in fact practice in the U.S. Medical school teaches you basics, but residency training is where you essentially learn how to practice real medicine. Not surprising that people trained under U.S residency programs at U.S teaching hospitals would perform similarly. The post earlier saying bring foreign doctors to fix a "shortage" doesn't work because there are a finite # of residency spots.
The standard of care in the US isn't that great. Better to see a doctor from another country than not be able to see a doctor at all.
