"Gene Kearns" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 23 Jul 2009 13:07:23 -0400, penned the
following well considered thoughts to the readers of rec.boats:
|On Thu, 23 Jul 2009 09:21:52 -0700 (PDT), Frogwatch
wrote:
|
|With all the consideration of the govt being the party that sets
|medical prices at Canadian levels, who will pay for the R&D? Most R&D
|for med stuff is done in the USA because we pay for it and essentially
|the USA subsidizes Canadian medicine because they do NOT pay for the
|R&D, US citizens do. The govt will not pay for it and are not even
|qualified to do so. Most advances in medicine and drugs over the last
|50 years would never have been funded by the govt. I know from
|personal experience that govt experts rarely know enough about what
|really works.
|Most medical R&D is funded by pvt companies who know they will make
|money if the process works. If they cannot make a profit, no more
|R&D, no advances in treatments, no new drugs.
|
|The only way to cut the cost of medical care is to cut jobs and
|downgrade the salaries of the people they keep. Nobody says that.
|
We need to first cut the incomes of physicians. They should be paid no
more than college professor.... they have the same length of training.
Think about it, we didn't have these escalating costs until physicians
stopped making house calls to herd sick folks into overcrowded waiting
rooms for 4 hour waits to maximize income. (At this point, they were
working for the maximum income, not because the enjoyed the job.)
These folks made fabulous sums and were *very* surprised that they
became targets for lawsuits. Gosh, Really? Amazing!
Let's find folks that *want* to work in health care and pay them an
equitable wage.... that is the *same* thing that is going on in the
automotive industry today. A simple readjustment....
--
Agent 5.00 Build 1171
Grady-White Gulfstream, out of Oak Island, NC.
Homepage
http://pamandgene.tranquilrefuge.net/
Doctors work harder than College professors, and have to be successful also.
The record keeping adds tremendous overhead to the costs. Standardize a lot
of the records and you save a bunch. Limit some of the lawsuits. Sen.
Edwards made $60,000,000 on mostly bad lawsuits. Babies are born with
defects. Just because they are defective, is not necessarily the medical
professions fault. Those lawsuits cause lots of unnecessary tests to be run
to just provide liability coverage. Probably costs us 10x what the lawsuits
cost. We should tell Europe that we did the development work on the drugs,
you will pay the going rate. Not some arbitrarily assigned number. I did
do Biomed development. Venture capitalists dumped $45,000,000 into the
company. Little return. Should have been a good return, but they picked
the wrong management. But even with good management, it may have been a
loss. You want the cost to go down for the uninsured / underinsured? Make
it the law that a person paying upfront for services gets the best rate an
insurance company gets, plus some small percent at most. The medical
facility gets the money promptly, not 3-9 months later.