Comments on: YES WE CAN’T … DO OUR OWN THINKING

By: Matt Horn

Matt Horn — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 21:50:58 +0000

#1 insurance companies are not known for practicing medicine, they just pay for what is in the contract,
#2 Insurance is a risk industry. If there was no risk, there would be no insurance.
#3 I can’t manage your practice for you, but it sounds like your own decisions, however well intentioned, were the casue of your failure. Note that those decisions also adversely effected your staff. There is a responsibility of stewardship to them as well. We can’t be all things to all people.

PS: Those are all great examples of the free market drmatt. Burying of product information, like the tags on a hair dryer that warns people not to use it in the shower, or the indications on Phen-Fen that say it should only be used on the morbidly obese, as significant cardiac issues could occur? Insulating us from stupidity and misuse. These are put on by manufacturers to limit their liability when brain-dead morons misuse their product.
Shipping jobs overseas, well when the tax code becomes confiscatory and wages are artificially inflated, the market moves towards equilibrium. I’m sure you wouldn’t mind paying $400 for a pair of sneakers so a high school dropout can make a “living wage.” no?
Holding back patents? I am not sure what you are talking about. Maybe the Pogue carburetor or Meyer’s water car?

By: Marc Brown

Marc Brown — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 21:45:31 +0000

Drmatt, our friends seem to be under the delusion that free market incentives are to provide universal care, when in fact they are to maximise profit from the most profitable. Do you think they should be seeing a doctor for their condition, or is it terminal?

By: drmatt

drmatt — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 20:03:08 +0000

PS I did notice how the free market benefited me with planned obsolesence, the recurrent burying of information that would notify me of danger or significant problems with a product, the shipping of our manufacturing jobs over seas, the holding back of important patents until there is “market saturation” of a companies current product, or patents that increase fuel efficiency, these would all be great for health care being self regulating and all.

By: drmatt

drmatt — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 19:59:23 +0000

#1 If you dont do a good job in a heart attack, cancer, stroke, pneumonia, renal failure or thousand of other possibilities you can’t go to the competition, it is too late, you are dead.
#2 The money made in health care year after year, decade after decade comes from the healthy and the well off, the rest of the population is a losing proposition for money minded business men, i.e. people who are really sick cant work, thus cant make money thus cant pay the bill.
#3 The reason that I went out of business in medicine is that I treated every person who walked through my door, Cant see turning people away because they cant afford it. try it sometime, try looking that little old lady in the eye who has crappy medicare, who’s children and grandchildren you care for and know well and say, “sorry, despite the fact that I am trained, competent and available I am not going to help you because you can’t afford me”

By: Matt Horn

Matt Horn — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 19:45:53 +0000

Why not drmatt? If they don’t do a good job, people will go to their competition and they will be out of business. The free market is generally self regulating to the benefit of the consumer when government is taken out of the picture. Only problem is, it shows the warts of “progressives.”

By: drmatt

drmatt — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 18:49:39 +0000

Yeah, your right, I think we should let monetarily motivated business men make our health care decisions..GOOD IDEA, you will be up for a nobel peace prize I am sure.

By: Ed Sodaro MD

Ed Sodaro MD — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 18:23:07 +0000

“Dr. Sodaro is obviously confused, whenever the govt has opened a new commision they have hired people knowlegable in the field not transferred people from the DMV!!!”

Wow, I did not literally mean that people would be transferred from the Post Office or DMV to micromanage Obama healthcare! Amazing!

But we do have actual living horror-show examples of how The Anointed Ones and their troll advocates would treat people in US government health care systems: The Indian Health Care System, the Community Mental Heath Care Clinics, and the VA.

And citing ATF, SS, DOE and so forth does not in the slightest strengthen any argument for government efficiency or competence! LOL!

By: drmatt

drmatt — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 18:12:44 +0000

whoa, Let’s jail those Nazis that also started the public school system in the US!!! Those anti-market bastards!!!

By: Catron

Catron — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 17:58:13 +0000

“Unless you’re advocating unleashing a squad of Dr Mengeles”

Ironically, the regime that actually unleashed Dr. Mengele was, like you, anti-market. Here’s Jonah Goldberg on the subject:

The Nazis were socialists. The Nazi ideologist Gregor Strasser put it succinctly: “We are enemies, deadly enemies, of today’s capitalist economic system …” The speech that first attracted a young Adolf Hitler to fascism was titled “How and by What Means Is Capitalism to Be Eliminated?”

By: Marc Brown

Marc Brown — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 17:27:24 +0000

You are confusing two things David - the imperative for patients to make informed choices, which should be a cornerstone of modern medicine, and the provision of an evidence base and a system to provide those choices (where it’s certain that many insurance plans limit choice). The latter will always be subject to expert input and regulation, unless you’re advocating unleashing a squad of Dr Mengeles on the public. Come to think of it, you are rather extreme…