War on sickness

POSTED BY: SergeantX
UPDATED: Thursday, April 27, 2006 20:46
VIEWED: 5120
PAGE 3 of 7

FIRST PAGE PREV PAGE 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 NEXT PAGE LAST PAGE

RUE

Sunday, April 9, 2006 3:47 AM

It's twisted. There are those poor enough to get medicaid who will get whatever care is government approved. Some may may get private charity care (St Jude's hospital for example). Others will show up at the local county hospital where they may get discounted care (depending). Some parents will get the surgery for their child anyway and be in complete financial ruin. And others do without.

Nearly everything I know I learned by the grace of others.

RUE

Sunday, April 9, 2006 3:52 AM

SergeantX,

I'm in complete agreement that routine health care is bitterly expensive. The next most costly system (per capita) costs HALF of what it does in the US and everyone is cared-for. For free (w/ no out of pocket expense.)

But that kind of savings isn't found is free-market medicine, it's found in socialized medicine.

If you are looking for answers, look to what is already proven to work.

Nearly everything I know I learned by the grace of others.

SERGEANTX

Sunday, April 9, 2006 5:02 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by rue:
But that kind of savings isn't found is free-market medicine, it's found in socialized medicine.

Hmmm. I think it would be found in abundance in free-market medicine, if that was ever allowed to exist. But the pressure to regulate and control the healthcare market is not a small thing. Industry lobbyists have worked long and hard to set the system up the way it is and they won't give it up without a fight.

Socialized medicine might, in fact, be better than what we have now (it'd certainly be better than this mandatory insurance bs), but that's not saying much. Just about anything would be better than the institutionalized blackmail we're currently burdened with. In my brightest moments of optimism I imagine us legalizing health care and actually allowing the free choices of patients to drive necessary solutions. But my optimism doesn't last long. I look around and that kind of solution isn't even on the radar. In fact the general consensus is that the patient needs more of the medicine that's killing her.

So I might say, "yeah, let's go ahead and socialize medicine", but only from a place of deeply cynical resignation. I'd like to think we can do better.

SergeantX

"Dream a little dream or you can live a little dream. I'd rather live it, cause dreamers always chase but never get it." Aesop Rock

RUE

Sunday, April 9, 2006 6:23 AM

You seem to think that bad medicine only came about after govt regulation and industry monopolization.

There were plenty of blacksmiths cum doctors cum butchers who killed their patients. There were also snake-oil peddlers who sold alcohol, mercury, arsenic and/or opium for whatever ailed you. The problem with that free-market 'medical practice' was that it was worse than ineffective, it was dangerous for the patient. As for the patient, your first medical purchase could be your last.

So in this day and age, how do you see unregulated medicine? What will keep the vacuum-cleaner lipo-suction surgeons from operating in patients garages? How will you know the medicine you're getting is uncontaminated, let alone effective?

As much as you want to believe that buying medical care is just like buying a stove, it isn't.

Nearly everything I know I learned by the grace of others.

SERGEANTX

Sunday, April 9, 2006 3:01 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by rue:
You seem to think that bad medicine only came about after govt regulation and industry monopolization.

No, but that is where the insanely overpriced medicine came from. There are countless ways patients could assure quality service from doctors without resorting to anti-competitive regulation. The problem with the alternatives (I'm assuming you'd consider it a problem) is that people would be free to make their own judgements on the nature of the quality vs. risk calculation. That's the essential ingredient of a free market.

Without that freedom, success in the industry is no longer a matter of quality service, it's a matter of politics. The winners are those who can control the regulatory environment. That's why the AMA, the insurance companies, the pharmas, etc.., flush million and millions of dollars down the DC toilet each year lobbying. That's money that could be spent making health care more efficient and more widely available.

SergeantX

"Dream a little dream or you can live a little dream. I'd rather live it, cause dreamers always chase but never get it." Aesop Rock

FLETCH2

Sunday, April 9, 2006 5:29 PM

I'm sorry I don't see that. How on earth could someone make an informed decision in those circumstances? Even now we have things that go drasticly wrong even with regulated medicine. Don't know if you saw the story about the guys in london who got very sick during the testing of a anti inflamatory drug? Or if you heard about the folks that setup medical tourism trips to Brazil for cosmetic surgery during which the patient got septicemia.

Look at one unregulated industry, vitamins, know how many of those natural stop smoking, get your hair back, loose weight commercials late at night are essentially herbal extracts and vitamin pills? They don't work but because they don't claim to be medicine they dont get sued. Yes the snake oil sales are still going. I'm sure they would just love to go bigtime.

RUE

Sunday, April 9, 2006 6:22 PM

Quote:
No, but that is where the insanely overpriced medicine came from.

And lower-cost medicine comes about in several ways. One is through the power of bulk purchase as a bargaining tool, which is what other governments successfully do. (see Canadien drug prices.) Another is through varied formulation and cheap mfg as India used to do, selling at 4cents on the dollar (saving 96% on your drug bill). But the market forces you propose don't always work, especially in the face of large international corporations. Individual purchases for low cost aggregated in the market-place are not bringing down the cost of gasoline.

Quote:
There are countless ways patients could assure quality service from doctors without resorting to anti-competitive regulation.

What are they? Without comparative studies done by neutral third parties, all you have is advertising and word of mouth. That may work for common ailments (tho 80% get better on their own), but what about appendicitis? Are you going to schlep from neighbor to neighbor doubled over in pain trying to find someone who had a successful appendectomy? Or what about a near-fatal car accident? What about rare conditions like non-Hodgkins lymphoma? If you are fighting for your or your child's, parent's, or spouses life, do you want to depend on TV commercials for your decisions?

Quote:
The problem with the alternatives (I'm assuming you'd consider it a problem) is that people would be free to make their own judgements on the nature of the quality vs. risk calculation.

There are some things the free market just can't do b/c it depends on individual perceptions (which are relatively uninformed AND subject to manipulation in an unregulated environment). Here is one example: a major study was conducted by a large HMO on the merits of urine culture and sensitivity (the 'gold standard') v dipstick screening. The upside of C&S is that you know for sure (4 missed cases/20,000) if you have a bacterial infection, and which antibiotic to use. The downside is you have to wait 4 days and go back to the doctor, and it's expensive and consumes a lot of resources to test a lot of negative cases (98% negative). What about dipstick screening first? Parallel tesing the same samples and using normal statistics you find that dipstick screening misses 5 cases/20,000 (false negatives), and finds 43 'extra' cases/20,000 (false positves). The benefit is both cost-saving to the medical system, since you don't do C&S on 19,600 negative urines, and those with actual UTIs get bridge treatment in one visit while C&S is being run.

There are many, many similar examples: needle biopsy v surgery/stained specimen (gold standard) to dx breast cancer, added protease inhibitors v anti-retrovirals alone (gold standard) for HIV; etc.

AS A CONSUMER, you will simply not know enough to determine how good the doctor/ protocol/ hospital is b/c you don't know the right questions to ask.

Where socialized medicine shines is its ability to discover the fastest, cheapest way to get the largest number of people healthy. (See previous post that getting care to all people would save more lives than all the high tech combined). It shines at creating efficient protocols. It benefits from aggregate data over a large number of people when it comes to rare/ poorly understood conditions like autism or chronic pain. Finally, it makes sense as a public health/ security function. (Public health which is the front-line of detection has been gutted.)

I realize I'm arguing against a powerful ideology that you hold, but as a consumer of medicine, isn't that product you want?

Nearly everything I know I learned by the grace of others.

RUE

Sunday, April 9, 2006 7:23 PM

BTW, I abhor big-money medicine. But that IS what the current kleptocracy wants - billions in tax money as private profit.

But to fix it I don't start with the axiom 'government = always wrong, free-market = always right'. Nor do I sart with the opposite. You say free-market medicine could work if given the chance. Historically, free-market medicine gave rise to the phrase 'snake-oil'. It HAS been tried and it failed. Another way to break big-money medicine is government-run medicine. Looking around the world, it has been tried and it DOES work. It is a superior product.

Nearly everything I know I learned by the grace of others.

PIRATENEWS

Sunday, April 9, 2006 8:29 PM

Will this new law require 40-million to 100-million ILLEGAL aliens to purchase this insurance contract? If not, this law is void under Constitutional Equal Protection doctrine.

No "driver" can be rquired to purchase car insurance, unless they are employed as a commercial driver "for hire". Period. Read the fine print of your state's statute on car insurance. In Tennessee, insurance is only "required" AFTER you CAUSE a crash AND ONLY if you FAIL to pay damages to an injured party, and you OWE NO MONEY AT ALL if your assets fall under the Homestead Exemptions in your state. Yet Gangsta Govt and insurance scams bribe TV with adverts that fraudulently allege "mandatory insurance".

Insurance ocmpanies are criminal extortion rackets, run by career criminals who routinely refuse to pay claims. They originated in Europe with the Italian Mafia. Insurance CEOs routinely pay themselves individual annual salaries of $100-million/year to billions/year - PER PERSON.

Obviously this Mass law is a genocide program for the sheeple. The US Govt and those that preceeded it have already genocided over 200-million Americans. US and world dictators like the King of England publish books confessing their plan to genocide 90% of world poulation via manmade diseases - and these are the same psychopaths to fund and manage military bioweapons labs in every major city.

Quote:
"Humans have overpopulated the Earth and in the process have created an ideal nutritional substrate on which bacteria and viruses (microbes) will grow and prosper. We are behaving like bacteria growing on an agar plate, flourishing until natural limits are reached or until another microbe colonizes and takes over. I am convinced that the world WOULD clearly be much better off without so many of us. The ancient Chinese curse 'may you live in interesting times' comes to mind -- we are living in one of the most interesting times humans have ever experienced."
-Prof Eric R. Pianka
http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/%7Evaranus/Everybody.html

"He's a radical thinker, that one! I mean, he's basically advocating for the death of all but 10% of the current population! And at the risk of sounding just as radical, I think he's right. It's the harsh reality that many people alive right now should be dead. And even harsher to think that the world would be better off with them dead too."
-Serenity, associate cult member of Dr Pianka, "Dr. Death Gets FBI Visit - Media, colleagues continue to portray him as the innocent victim," April 6, 2006
www.prisonplanet.com/articles/april2006/060406fbivisit.htm

Serenity Blog
http://brenmccnnll.blogspot.com/2006/03/dr.html

VIDEO DOWNLOAD: NBC News - UT Genocide Scientist Backpedals on News Report
http://infowars.com/video/clips/news/science/040406_ut_genocide_scient
ist.htm
www.kxan.com/Global/story.asp?S=4720390

US professor wants genocide of 5.5-billion humans by bioterrorism - Fellow professors and scientists applause and roar approval at elite's twisted and genocidal population control agenda
www.infowars.com/articles/commentary/emails_pianka_response_biologist.
htm

US Supreme Court legalized genocide in 1973 with Roe v Wade, with over 45-million Americans genocided as a result of this court order. For every child murdered, an adult must also be murdered, to balance Social Security Ponzi pension schemes, Medicaid/Medicare Ponzi schemes, private insurance Ponzi schemes, govt CAFR pension Ponzi schemes, Wall Street pension Ponzi schemes, etc.

No Gangsta Govt can illegally order any person to enter into a civil contract with a private company, nor with Gangsta Govt. By legal definition, all contracts must be voluntary, without coercion or duress, or they are void. Will Gangsta Govt order all citizens to sign a contract to purchase monthly items from YOUR store or business? NOT!

Mandatory insurance cons the sheeple into volunteering for lethal injection with:

1. live cancer virus
2. live bioweaponized flu virus
3. live bioweaponized polio virus
4. live bioweaponized diseases of all kinds
5. mercury (Thimeriso

CITIZEN

Sunday, April 9, 2006 9:02 PM

I have to profess I don't understand the argument for private healthcare.

Off on a tangent couldn't we privatise the military and police force? Hell even the fire service? Why don't we, why doesn’t a free market supporter say we should?

At the moment when your house is burning down you have no choice, surely it would be better to chose with fire company you want to put your fire out, look them up in the yellow pages (or American equivalent) or directory enquires, then ring them up, be put on hold (but it's okay your call is VERY important too them) then negotiate the payment contract before they put the fire out.

Or if you have fire insurance you pay twice the amount you used to for the public system to get the same service (run for a profit) but you do get a mug.

What I’m trying to say is that there are certain things that work with a *somewhat* free market system (but anyone who thinks regulation is the problem needs to crack open a history book) and some things that don’t. A clue would be anything that has service in the title, the police service, the fire service, the HEALTH service.

I sometimes think that people have got it into their heads (and this mainly *seems* to be an American thing, not really comes across it in Britain, maybe because communism/socialism was your big bad, ours was the French?) that under ALL circumstances socialist/public == wrong, private/free market == right.

More insane ramblings by the people who brought you beeeer milkshakes!
No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity. But I know none, and therefore am no beast.

FIRST PAGE PREV PAGE 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 NEXT PAGE LAST PAGE