Obstetricians take big steps to avoid malpractice
http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20110304/FREE/110309912
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http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20110304/FREE/110309912
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Small Business: Doctors going broke
- Thread starter Steve Williams
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I think a lot of the answers have to do with the increasing reliance on regulation:
http://www.theobjectivestandard.com/issues/2007-winter/moral-vs-universal-health-care.asp
Then we should be good, with regulation at a low, and enforcement even lower.
Tim
Any financially effective health care reform would be devastating for the insurance industry and very hard on the pharma and corporate health care industries. Similarly, any meaningful tax reform will wreak havoc on the legal and accounting fields. All of the above would eliminate huge sources of campaign dollars for the politics business.
And now we have defined why nothing substantive ever happens.
Tim
Yet are the current practices sustainable? An economy based solely on consumption has to be brittle . Is it what we are seeing?
Just finished working my way through this thread. Not worth debating the views expressed here because if you step back and look at the big picture, it really doesn't matter. The fact is that all Western countries are devoting an increasing amount of resources to healthcare. It doesn't matter what type of approach to healthcare is taken This is summarized below:
Source: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (2010), "OECD Health Data", OECD Health Statistics (database)
Heathcare expenditures are but a proxy for the West's 100 year old, unsustainable social welfare experiment that is beginning to unravel. The West simply is not growing enough (economically or population-wise) to support an ever enlarging dependent class. Imagine you are canoeing on a river, approaching a large waterfall. Paddling slower towards the falls only postpones the inevitable. Instead of pulling off to the river bank, the US currently seems intent on paddling more furiously to catch up with Europe.
When given the choice over the past century, the West has consistent sacrificed individual liberty for the perceived comfort and safety of government programs. Inevitably those programs, deform the culture and re-arrange priorities. This cultural change is manifest by rioting in Greece over austerity and rioting in London, well just to riot. In this country we have OWS; the first movement of big-government anarchists. Ironically, the option between individual liberty and government security is ahem...a "false choice"; ultimately you have less of both.
Similarly, societies have to choose between a robust social welfare state and being able to project power to protect your interests. Europe long ago chose the former, abetted by the US defense umbrella. With this week's announcement of further downsizing of the US military, America will become more like Europe; a 'soft power' unable to project real power. The result is a more dangerous, unstable world.
Source: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (2010), "OECD Health Data", OECD Health Statistics (database)
Heathcare expenditures are but a proxy for the West's 100 year old, unsustainable social welfare experiment that is beginning to unravel. The West simply is not growing enough (economically or population-wise) to support an ever enlarging dependent class. Imagine you are canoeing on a river, approaching a large waterfall. Paddling slower towards the falls only postpones the inevitable. Instead of pulling off to the river bank, the US currently seems intent on paddling more furiously to catch up with Europe.
When given the choice over the past century, the West has consistent sacrificed individual liberty for the perceived comfort and safety of government programs. Inevitably those programs, deform the culture and re-arrange priorities. This cultural change is manifest by rioting in Greece over austerity and rioting in London, well just to riot. In this country we have OWS; the first movement of big-government anarchists. Ironically, the option between individual liberty and government security is ahem...a "false choice"; ultimately you have less of both.
Similarly, societies have to choose between a robust social welfare state and being able to project power to protect your interests. Europe long ago chose the former, abetted by the US defense umbrella. With this week's announcement of further downsizing of the US military, America will become more like Europe; a 'soft power' unable to project real power. The result is a more dangerous, unstable world.
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Can you say John Edwards
I can, but medical mal practice was not his specialty.
Tim
Of course they are. Aging populations, advancing technology, incredible strides in pharmacology and people living much longer in Western countries all mean they will dovote an increasing amount of resources to healthcare regardless of how it's funded. But of course it matters what type of approach is taken. An approach that provides better care, more efficiently is probably the only way to address the demand, unless you just want to let things revert to rising infant mortality, early death, bad health...and the hit in productivity we would take as a result.
The rest of you post is just standard right-wing American fare. You can just as easily make the argument that economies based on shareholder returns and the constant demand for greater growth are unsustainable and that we must find, instead, a way to bring more people into relative affluence and security, provide good jobs, good education, good healthtcare and good safety nets for when those fail, that we should make a sustainable high quality of life our national priority, not constant economic growth and ever-greater advantage created for the advantaged.
Of course that's socialist talk. Free the wealthy and the will create more wealth, build more industry, create jobs and prosperity and their wealth will trickle down to the rest of us. Still waiting.....
Tim
In 1961, the newly elected, youthful Democratic President declared at his inagural: "We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution. Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans -- born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage, and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.
Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty."
Those stirring sentiments would have been readily received in 1761 or 1861 but to contemporary Americans, these words seem from an unimaginable past, not from just fifty years ago. Can you imagine any Democrat saying those words today? Can you imagine the country's reaction, especially the cultural elites, to a contemporary leader who dared to speak such words? I will posit that this is an inevitable consequence of the social welfare experiment.
Our liberties are mercilessly encroached upon by a government that only wants the best for us; to hermetically shield us from all vicissitudes of the human existence. But rather than protecting us, it prevents us from realizing our unique potential. As De Tocqueville first warned "I think therefore that the kind of oppression with which democratic peoples are threatened will resemble nothing that has preceded it in the world. The thing is new, therefore I must try to define it, since I cannot name it...
I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls. Each of them, withdrawn and apart, is like a stranger to the destiny of all the others...
Above these an immense tutelary power is elevated, which alone takes charge of assuring their enjoyments and watching over their fate. It is absolute, detailed, regular, far-seeing, and mild. It would resemble paternal power if, like that, it had for its object to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary, it seeks only to keep the fixed irrevocably in childhood; it likes citizens to enjoy themselves provided that they think only of enjoying themselves. It willing works for their happiness; but it wants to be the unique agent and sole arbiter of that; it provides for their security, foresees and secures their needs, facilitates their pleasures, conducts their principal affairs, directs their industry, regulates their estates, divides their inheritances.... can it not take away from them entirely the trouble of thinking and the pain of living?
So it is that every day it renders the employment of free will less useful and more rare: it confines the action of the will in a smaller space and little by little steals the very use of free will from each citizen."
Just as 'too big to fail' in the financial services and housing industries paradoxically increase systemic risk, systemically denying individuals the right to fail of their own accord aggregates poor decisions with inevitable consequences for the society as a whole. If you heavily subsidize anything, be it healthcare or bad behavior, you will most assuredly get more of whatever it is you are subsidizing.
Here's a vision for contemplation:
I think there are certain individuals who think that universal health care means that they will become the six million dollar man on the public tax dime.
They think they can drink, smoke, use drugs, live recklessly, reproduce incontinently and they will get liver, lung, kidney and heart transplants on demand with all the artificial limbs and eyes they may require, without supporting their own children or even working.
Universal health care may actually mean that acute and catastrophic care will improve dramatically and nobody has to go bankrupt over it.
However, for every thing else, if you work, you may very well find yourself in line way behind the guy down the street who smoked, drank beer and ate fritos all day without looking for a job while living with his mom. You will croak while your transplant goes to somebody with political influence or a "lottery winner" randomly assigned.
Shades of gray diagnosis will disappear, anything remotely elective will take waiting until your are nearly dead before you qualify, and the services will be provided by providers who are the health care equivalent of the bored, rude DMV guy or gal when you go to get your driver's license, or the guys that gave you your draft physical.
There will be huge, inefficient bureaucracies soaking up massive amounts of funding, government money will be paid by pork barrel politics. Healthcare funding and distribution will become even more of a political football. Just as with our present public extortion unions, all of these grafty public servants hired to mange and administer the health cares system will now comprise a voting and lobbying constituency that will be aimed at perpetuating their own advantages rather than the public interest.
Politicians will exempt themselves from universal healthcare, no standing in line for them, and set up a separate elite system for themselves with all the best doctors and facilities, at public expense, just as they presently have for their own pensions and grafty benefits, while legislating that the rest of us don't deserve such lofty perks.
The government will eventually use access to medical care to enforce other kinds of political agendas, pretty much the way Russia did and does. Mental hospitals were effectively used as prisons for dissidents. Political assassinations could be conducted in government hospitals.
Then, guess what, to get what you need outside of catastrophic care, you will either need private insurance or you will need to pay for it directly, but you will be paying higher and higher taxes to support the system that you can't use otherwise.
However, that is only if you work. So now there is even a greater incentive NOT to work, but just hang out on your porch eating fritos, drinking beer, reproducing incontinently etc. etc. Welcome to the brave new world.
By the way, this is a bit of a Fox Network spoof, so don't take it too seriously.
I think there are certain individuals who think that universal health care means that they will become the six million dollar man on the public tax dime.
They think they can drink, smoke, use drugs, live recklessly, reproduce incontinently and they will get liver, lung, kidney and heart transplants on demand with all the artificial limbs and eyes they may require, without supporting their own children or even working.
Universal health care may actually mean that acute and catastrophic care will improve dramatically and nobody has to go bankrupt over it.
However, for every thing else, if you work, you may very well find yourself in line way behind the guy down the street who smoked, drank beer and ate fritos all day without looking for a job while living with his mom. You will croak while your transplant goes to somebody with political influence or a "lottery winner" randomly assigned.
Shades of gray diagnosis will disappear, anything remotely elective will take waiting until your are nearly dead before you qualify, and the services will be provided by providers who are the health care equivalent of the bored, rude DMV guy or gal when you go to get your driver's license, or the guys that gave you your draft physical.
There will be huge, inefficient bureaucracies soaking up massive amounts of funding, government money will be paid by pork barrel politics. Healthcare funding and distribution will become even more of a political football. Just as with our present public extortion unions, all of these grafty public servants hired to mange and administer the health cares system will now comprise a voting and lobbying constituency that will be aimed at perpetuating their own advantages rather than the public interest.
Politicians will exempt themselves from universal healthcare, no standing in line for them, and set up a separate elite system for themselves with all the best doctors and facilities, at public expense, just as they presently have for their own pensions and grafty benefits, while legislating that the rest of us don't deserve such lofty perks.
The government will eventually use access to medical care to enforce other kinds of political agendas, pretty much the way Russia did and does. Mental hospitals were effectively used as prisons for dissidents. Political assassinations could be conducted in government hospitals.
Then, guess what, to get what you need outside of catastrophic care, you will either need private insurance or you will need to pay for it directly, but you will be paying higher and higher taxes to support the system that you can't use otherwise.
However, that is only if you work. So now there is even a greater incentive NOT to work, but just hang out on your porch eating fritos, drinking beer, reproducing incontinently etc. etc. Welcome to the brave new world.
By the way, this is a bit of a Fox Network spoof, so don't take it too seriously.
All I saw in your post was a few quotes of some notables, but they are just words. I see nothing of concrete substance or fact that says our civil liberties have been sacrificed or our cultures deformed.
Can you say Military spending?
Can you say Military spending?
The impact on our liberties is so ubiquitous, people no longer give notice:
If you own a business, how much time do you spend complying with regulations?
If you've built a house, how painless was it to deal with the local government?
Or how about travel? You buy a car, you pay a tax. You buy gas, you pay a tax. You cross a bridge, you pay a tax. How about the more refined modes of travel like the airplane? To wit:
"At a small airport the other day, I saw a passenger with a popular attitudinal T-shirt slogan patiently submitting to an enhanced gropedown from the TSA. It was a poignant image of the republic at twilight: a man in a “Don’t Tread On Me” T-shirt being trod all over. I wonder why more Americans aren’t outraged by this:
Her 95-year-old mother was detained and extensively searched last Saturday while trying to board a plane to fly to Michigan to be with family members during the final stages of her battle with leukemia.
Her mother, who was in a wheelchair, was asked to remove an adult diaper in order to complete a pat-down search.
There is a term for regimes that submit law-abiding wheelchair-bound dying nonagenarians to public humiliations without probable cause and it isn’t “republic of limited government.” Given everybody’s touchiness over Kathryn’s North Korean comparisons, I’ll say only this: George III wouldn’t have done this to you.
Amy Alkon posts a response from a bureaucratic bozo to her own experience at the airport. Caution for sensitive types: The word “labia” is included. But that’s because in 21st century America the anatomical feature “labia” are included in a trip to the airport – and that’s what should concern you. As the crack TSA agent informs Miss Alkon, “We go thru sensitive areas with back of hand.”
That’s great news! Somewhere on page 273 of the handbook, there’s a graphic detailing the precise point on the upper thigh where the licensed state groper is obliged to invert his paw." -- Mark Steyn
There are precious few activities that are completely free of government's benevolent involvement.
And let's not forget that the current administration sanctions the killing of US citizens. http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/09/obama-assassinates-us-citizen
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