From: sbpress@csws20 (The Stony Brook Press)
Subject: Re: health care industry woes
Organization: The State University of New York at Stony Brook
X-Newsreader: Tin 1.1 PL4
Distribution: usa
Date: Wed, 18 Nov 1992 17:25:46 GMT

sherw@ocf.berkeley.edu (Gregory Sherwin) writes:
: 
: Has anyone else noticed these things?:
: 
: Doctors were first against Medicare and Medicaid when it was first introduced
: years ago, but since then their salaries have skyrocketed.  Physicians weren't
: one of thye top income earners until government paid for care for
: that many more patients, and hence many doctors learned that you could process
: patients like an assembly line earning an amount of money for each as set
: and provided by the government (this does not speak for everyone - but a
: trend since Medicare and Medicaid).
: 
: The health insurance industry sets our costs without any real consideration
: for supply and demand economics.  Doctor X comes up with a new procedure --
: how much to charge for it?  Doctors work with the insurance industry to
: set some relatively arbitrary value to it - ie. what the insurance company
: will pay for it - and therefore doctors and hospitals charge that amount.
: This is called a cartel in many circles of the world.  Specializations
: with ridiculous incomes like radiology seem to be more out of self-
: fabrication than a true sense of economics, and hence general family
: physicaians - the REAL care providers - are economically weeded out.  Medical
: school bills are huge, and if you can pay them off faster becoming a
: radiologist, it's only rational that many do so vs. becoming a general
: practitioner.
: 
: In an independent study comparing a Canadian hospital with an American one -
: where there was approximate equivalence in skilled staff, specialization,
: equipment, etc.  For handling just insurance FORMS, the Canadian hospital
: had an office with 4 full-time staff members.  In the U.S. hospital - of
: equivalent size as the Canadian one - they had dedicated an entire BUILDING
: with 300 full-time employees to just paper pushing for the various
: insurance companies.
: 
: Also - rather than investing in improving technology to make it more cost
: effective, rewards with the government grant system and within the health
: care industry itself are focused on the latest and greatest technology.
: Which is fine, but when you create only 5 MRI's that are cutting-edge
: technology that will be outdated in 6-months for entirely new ones, your
: front -end development costs (passed on to consumers) is ridiculously
: high.  This is why you have $300 ashtrays and $400 screw-drivers in the
: military.  Too many pats on the back, nifty papers, and awards rather than
: an investment in making a technology or procedure more universal and
: cost-effective.
: 
: Health care reform, I believe, must begin not with government, but within
: the industry itself.  The AMA should no longer be self-regulating...we are



	I also think, that the AMA's monopoly on health care should be
stoped.

 Let other organiztions provide liseneses and training also.

This will resuce the cost of health care.


Newsgroups: talk.politics.medicine