I have written before about ostensibly non-partisan organizations and publications that have been infected by faux-progressive politics. The latest victim of this contagion is the New England journal of Medicine, which provides space for political hack Robert Kuttner to promote discredited Lefty canards such as the following:
The extreme failure of the United States to contain medical costs results primarily from our unique, pervasive commercialization.
We do not, as Kuttner would admit if he were an honest man, have a “commercialized” health care system. It is rather a quasi-market system in which the government meddles at every level. But that doesn’t prevent him from invoking the usual Lefty hobgoblins:
The dominance of for-profit insurance and pharmaceutical companies, a new wave of investor-owned specialty hospitals, and profit-maximizing behavior even by nonprofit players raise costs and distort resource allocation.
He then goes on to describe what the “solution” will look like if he and his fellow travelers have their way:
A comprehensive national system is far better positioned to match resources with needs … A universal system suffers far less of the feast-or-famine misallocation of resources driven by profit maximization.
In other words, what we need is socialized medicine. And, to underscore that point, he praises the worst health care system in Europe as a model of efficiency:
When the British National Health Service faced a shortage of primary care doctors, it adjusted pay schedules and added incentives for high-quality care, and the shortage diminished.
This is manifestly false, as Kuttner well knows. The NHS suffers from a horrendous shortage of PCPs and dentists. And the measures cited by Kuttner have done nothing to alleviate that situation. Thus, the NHS increasingly relies on the importation of foreign-born physicians with these results.
That the NEJM gives space to this dishonest political hack and allows its pages to be sullied by Leftist agitprop is a true disgrace.
[via Kevin,MD]
Comments 4
When I was a student the NEJM was the Word From On High.
How the mighty have fallen. The most disgraceful and scary thing is that this hack job agitprop abomination may have actually been peer reviewed!
Posted 16 Feb 2008 at 6:50 pm ¶First, the charges taken out of US healthcare fo profit, admin and market are massive. There’s no dispute about that. Second, the NHS has no shortage of primary care doctors - the generous package offered by the government (some say over-generous) has ensured that. And third, you’d have us believe that the UK NHS is now infiltrated by Al Qaeda, and that presumably the US is populated only by Native Americans and not a single immigrant works in healthcare. Are you gunning for a sketch writer’s job on late night TV?
Posted 17 Feb 2008 at 10:03 am ¶“The charges taken out of US healthcare for profit, admin and market are massive. There’s no dispute about that.”
In reality, many people dispute it, including Charlie Baker in this post.
“The NHS has no shortage of primary care doctors.”
Here’s an article from the Evening Standard that says otherwise.
And here’s an article from the BBC that says it’s going to get worse.
And here’s an article from The Independent about the dentist shortage.
Posted 17 Feb 2008 at 11:32 pm ¶“We do not, as Kuttner would admit if he were an honest man, have a “commercialized” health care system.”
Catron, you need to buy a dictionary, there is not a day that goes by that I dont see or hear commercials for hospitals, drugs, specialty care, medical devices ets. additionally, all of the organizations that operate within health care work for “commerce” (the base word of commercialize) except the few not for profit community health centers. Despite government meddling this is still commercialized medicine, if you would like to work on your honesty you can say it is not a “free market” but you cannot say it is not commercialized, unless of course you want to continue embelishing to suit your own agenda, in that case…..carry on.
Posted 18 Feb 2008 at 7:24 am ¶Post a Comment