[Bill,
July 3, 2007]
Medical care costs
A lot of blogs have been talking about medical-care costs. I have to admit I'm totally at sea. I don't know why costs have gone up, don't understand, really, the causes of the problem. I'm also concerned about the politicization of the debate, which makes it difficult to get the facts.
People have talked about the French or Canadian or British system, and I'm open to any solutions. But there can't be a solution unless we understand what our problems are.
Totally confused, I am.
People have talked about the French or Canadian or British system, and I'm open to any solutions. But there can't be a solution unless we understand what our problems are.
Totally confused, I am.
That said, I don't really understand the problems either.
Though I'm sure they'd love to turn me (and my health insurance) into a lucrative cash cow: "Here, let's amputate your right arm, and see if that might help your test numbers a bit. Oh, and here are some more prescription drugs for you, expensive, dangerous, dubiously effective; but profitable to us."
Also, there's the problem of separating out medical care from lifestyle and culture. We live higher stress lives here in the US, and there are all sorts of weird aspects to our food, which is also vastly cheaper than food is (often) in europe. How do you separate those out?
And that's assuming that the medical statistics are accurate. When comparing against countries like Cuba that's a completely laughable assertion, but I'd also like to point out that the people in favor of centralized medicine are generally also the people who believe that governments lie all the time. Is Canada and France really as forthcoming as possible about the downsides to their care? How can we ever even find out?
(Also, there's the question about who pays for drug research, who pays for expensive experimental procedures before they're done often enough to be cheaper standard procedures, etc.)
There's also standards-of-care issues; as I gather in countries with socialized medicine you have no recourse if doctors do a bad job, so they don't have to care what you think, so they don't have to run every test and spend a lot of their time on you. One of the benefits of not having to care about what the customer thinks is that you don't have to waste time making the customer happy. (Since I suspect that doctors will generally do a decent job just for reasons of morality, removing customer satisfaction will make them more efficient without — in most cases — significantly reducing the quality of care.)
Also, europeans are probably more used to death, old age, and suffering, so they don't worry so much about it and don't spend so much money to make old people's lives more comfortable or longer. Since most medical care doesn't do much of anything anyway (let's be realistic here; for the most part the body heals itself, and our main advances have been hygene, antibiotics, pain killers and some surgeries, with most everything else yielding only minor statistical benefits. Those things only apply in some cases), people expecting less of medicine will make it cheaper without substantially changing the results. Some things doctors can really help you with -- quite a lot the best that they can do is serve as extremely expensive psychological comfort that you've done everything that you can do.