You completely ignore how the American Medical Association successfully keeps the supply of new doctors artificially low with its lobbying of Congress to limit funding for medical schools and immigration by doctors trained in other countries, as well as ignoring anti-trust regulations regarding placement of newly graduated medical students in hospital residencies.
And that doesn’t even address how local medical boards in many metro areas effectively serve as gatekeepers for new doctors being able to enter the local market given how referrals are used to punish or reward those new doctors based on how they conduct their own billing and referral practices.
Overall, that oligarchic control over physician services contributes substantially to doctors in the US earning on average far more than doctors in other major developed countries.
But, yeah. Go ahead and blame the downstream participants in this thoroughly rigged healthcare system.
Have you seen THIS webpage, Tickle?
https://www.nhs.uk/using-the-nhs/nhs...es-in-england/
18 weeks, y'all.The maximum waiting time for non-urgent consultant-led treatments is 18 weeks from the day your appointment is booked through the NHS e-Referral Service, or when the hospital or service receives your referral letter.
Wanna see a specialist? If you book it today, you'll see them in April 2020.
Tight healthcare system. I can get into a specialist this week -- sometimes even same day -- if I call right now. Same deal with tests.
The US system needs reform, but LOL at the UK's NHS being held up as an example we should emulate.
Tulsi is running to be Bernie's VP.
Her (successful) attack on Kamala Harris was a backdoor favor to Bernie, and indeed knocked out one of his major opponents.
She would actually be a great VP pick for him, and there's a good chance that's where he'll go, but the problem is that I just don't see him getting the nomination.
Actually, all of these points are legitimate, and reform is definitely needed regarding the shortage of doctors in the US. As I've said many times, many areas of our existing healthcare system needs reform, and this is one of them.
However, this is NOT the reason doctors in the US earn more than their other first-world counterparts. Also, as nightmarefish pointed out, many doctors start out heavily in debt, and can't get their careers started until they're around 30 years old. They also spend a tremendous amount of time and effort in residency for very little pay -- something also overlooked and which is both unfair to young doctors AND dangerous for patients.
The reason the US doctors earn more is because of the antiquated, opaque, and piecemeal billing system which allows the same test/exam/procedure to be billed several different ways, and for the patient to have no visibility into what services he's buying (or their cost) until it's too late.
Lobbying allows artificially high Medicare rates to be set for certain tests and procedures, which then affects private insurance rates, which doctors then pick up on and look to steer you toward those tests and procedures. Then the loophole is eventually closed, and another one pops up, and it's an endless game of whack-a-mole.
I'm not blaming the people "downstream". I'm blaming lobbyists, politiicans, and healthcare providers.
Want a good example of this? The nuclear stress test is a somewhat harmful and often-ordered test ordered by cardiologists, simply because it's far more lucrative than its non-radioactive counterpart. This vast difference in compensation was a result of corrupt lobbying. In turn, many unethical cardiologists will tell patients they need a nuclear stress test, even when they don't really need it at all.
My mom was even an attempted victim of this scam. Her cardiologist asked her to take one of these, and she was suspicious. She then spoke up and said, "My son is a top cardiologist at Stanford. If you don't mind, I'm going to ask him for his opinion, as well." The doctor seemed nervous, and then later on in the day, he personally called her and said that he had been thinking about it, and decided she only needed the non-nuclear version. He then offered to schedule the test "any time, even today, just tell me when", and went into full asskiss mode. Basically the guy was in a panic because he knew my brother would tell her that she was being scammed, and he didn't want his reputation ruined. Indeed, when she told my brother about it, he said that a nuclear stress test was ridiculous given her circumstances.
That's Medicare lobbying at work. Lobbyists get the nuclear stress test reimbursement rate set artificially high, the insurance companies are then pressured to follow suit, and then doctors go out of their way to make sure their patients get that test, even if unnecessary.
This isn't capitalism. It's corruption. And it will get worse under Medicare For All.
Corruption is baked in with capitalism
its not an anti-war stance, its an anti-intelligence stance. shes donald trump with tits and youre balls deep in her because you finally found a republican you dont have to be embarrassed to support.
blaming the cia for taking part in the cold war, neoconservative adventurism, and otherwise implementing policies dictated by sitting presidents exploitive, alarming, and nefarious.
fuck off my block with your cult of tulsi feelings.
"Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness." - Alejandro Jodorowsky
"America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers." -- William S. Burroughs
gg Kamala
Whoa!!! In both posts, you are blaming the healthcare industry’s lobbying of Medicare for essentially forcing doctors to abuse the billing system to artificially inflate their practice and income with unnecessary/expensive testing that private insurance companies are then forced to cover and pass the cost on to policyholders, and then turn around and force doctors to face supposedly draconian reimbursement rates in order to recover the cost of their med school debt.
Yet, how do you think that the health care industry is able to lobby Medicare to set high rates for certain medical testing??? They primarily use market prices of the few doctors who perform those procedures, which is artificially inflated by the medical community controlling the supply of doctors who are trained to perform/supervise those procedures.
And who controls how much Congress subsidizes med schools for prospective new doctors? The AMA with the same lobbying power it brings to bear on Medicare.
Really, Druff. You seem to be very selective in who you identify as the bad actors in this system. Somehow it’s the amorphous “Medicare”, when the primary agents of the questionable job Medicare does are the professionals who organize and lobby to get extremely favorable treatment by the government.
i can now get rich on Hillary, Booker or Tulsi to win the Dem nom.
and im loving Bernie +500 on sportsbook.ag to win Iowa
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