Dave wrote:

Dave is blaming the doctors of course!

Not at all. If the politicians want to throw money at the doctors I don't
fault the doctors for saying "thank you very much" and sticking the cash in
their pockets.

I don't think the Government is throwing money at doctors at all, you're
missing the point; doctors are only getting 6% of the health care
dollar. There's huge chunks going to a bloated administrative system,
probably even vaster amounts going to the legal system and all the
people employed therein busy suing the **** out each other, this is
perhaps somewhat euphemistically called "Malpractice Insurance".

Without going into a lengthy history lesson, the point is that we have for a
long period of time treated medical services differently from other services
by removing all incentives for the person making the purchasing decision to
weigh cost against benefit. When the cost to the decision maker of acquiring
any goods or services goes to near zero, the quantity demanded is going to
go up, and the price increase. It's a classic example of unintended
consequences of the politician's mantra "I'm gonna give you something and
somebody else is gonna pay for it."

Funny, it doesn't seem to work that way in the rest of the
industrialized world; we (they} know that health care is not free and is
being paid for by our taxes. As I pointed out in a previous post, the
US already spends more per capita than the rest of the G8, you've just
got to figure out a way to spend the *SAME* amount of money and deliver
health care to everyone. It's been done by lots of other countries, so
it's possible.

Cheers
Marty