How would you fix the health care problem in the US?

even the doctors have debunked this idea.

 

"Cut DRs pay by 75% and find a way to pay them bonuses to a) cure people and b) prevent illnesses in the first place. The good DRs will make more, the bad ones will say they deserve it because they went to med school and society owes them, while posting on ET.

Currently, DRs are paid more if their patients are unhealthy and even more than that if the DR prescribes medications which do not work....or make the patient sicker." by SPINN

SPINN, CAN I HAVE YOUR AUTOGRAPH!!!!

Talk about hitting it on the head! These textbook punks will not actually wanna be paid on merit or success, and they call the rest of us commies?

I suggest not letting the same people who mess up the DMV handle your health. They will end up just killing more people! However, say we socialize medicine, we can always just let them handle the financial side, NOT the decision side!

In other words, let them deposit funds into the doctors purse but not let them make life changing decisions. They already messed up NY and Katrina!

 

Um...it is overused because it's FREE to them and they have ALL day to sit in the doctors office. I generally like free stuff too.

Medicare is, however, bankrupting the children and grandchildren of these good old folks.

I completely agree with you about wanting every expensive and unproven possibly life-extending treatments for their 93 year old grandma. That's what happens when you force someone ELSE to pay for granny's health care. So, how much sooner do you think they would have pulled the plug on the dear 93 year old lady and let her go to her well-deserved rest if the FAMILY insisting on the treatment were forced to pay for more of it?

 

Want to cut doctors's pay? Easiest way to do that is to get rid of the AMA.

 

Well, now that's the reason that only one of the doctors I go to takes insurance. The really good ones seem to be opting out.

 

good point. Who will control and license doctors if not the AMA?

Isnt that the same as kill all the lawyers and burn all the schools?

Nice idea, but not practical. Too many corrupt idiots in law school and medicine.

Cutting back on the AMA is a good idea though Angrycat.

 

Abolish all healthcare. Outlaw it.

We're living too long as it is, and there are too many of us. We're rotting the planet. What have we done good lately? Nothing.

But keep dentists.

As long as we live, we should at least have decent teeth.

 

Include the most important component of health care – the American People.
Obama and congress tout that they are covering all the bases by including the doctors, the drug companies, the HMO’s, the insurance companies, and a host of other “players”. But I see no mention of any incentives to the American people to make any effort protect their own health, or disinsentives for abusing their health as is rampantly going on today. What they are basically saying is any person inside the borders of this country who has any medical problem will be eligible for all the gold-plated hi-tech goodies the medical establishment in this country has (and is eager) to offer.
The United States is a SICK NATION and getting sicker by the day. Granted, there are tens of millions of Americans who are very concerned about their health, seriously study about it, and do the best they can through diet and exercise to take care of their bodies. Unfortunately, there are tens of millions more, who through lack of education or unfortunate upbringing, cultural environment (eg. the local Quicky Mart), or just plain laziness, are content to become couch potatoes and progress to something much worse.
The real problem is that the cost of providing “health care” to one of the slackers who has really let him/herself go when a crisis arises will wipe out the healthcare savings of 10 of the people who have been struggling to take good care of themselves. So the field is tilted way over in their direction and all the projections of “cost savings” and “efficiencies” in the supposed new plan will be wiped out in a short time by army of newly eligible sickos who present themselves at the “health care” door.
12 years ago I read an advertisement in my local Sunday newspaper looking for children of Type 2 Diabetics who would like to participate in a nationwide study being conducted by the National Institute of Health. The object of the study was to see if those children of Type 2 Diabetics could take measures that would delay the onset of Diabetes in their own lives or eliminate it completely. To be eligible for the study, glucose tolerance blood test had the show that the child of the diabetic parent was in the “pre-diabetes” stage. = gonna be a diabetic soon. I was shocked to find out I met the criteria. http://diabetes.niddk.nih.gov/dm/pubs/preventionprogram/
There were 4 groups in the study:1) a placebo group, 2) a group taking a drug called Metformin, 3) a group taking the drug troglidazone, 4) a “lifestyle” group which took no drugs but was required to lose a minimum 7% of body weight and exercise 150 minutes a week. Luckily, I was random computer selected to the “lifestyle” group – and it has changed my life ever since. I may have had an advantage in that I saw firsthand how my father (#1 customer of the Outback Steakhouse) suffered the last 3 years of his life due to
his diabetes. The study did provide us with excellent training on how to develop our own workable diets, and things like mental control, etc. It took a lot of effort and change of behavior on my part, but I am still in the study, near my goal weight, and my blood sugar today is actually more “normal” than it was 12 years ago.
The numbers on the Diabetes epidemic in this country are astounding. More than 125,000 people “convert” to this condition every MONTH. Most won’t know until the symptoms start showing up a few years later, but by then it is too late. The total population affected in the U.S. is approaching 20 MILLION. This is a disease which was UNKOWN in this country 100 years ago. Spending countless hours sitting on our asses looking at the world thru Bill Gate’s “Windows” (applicable to traders??), driving around in cars instead of walking, and indulging in all those goodies loaded with (from the label on one children’s breakfast cereal) “corn, sugar, corn syrup(a form of sugar), high-fructose corn syrup (another form of sugar), brown sugar,…..” (this a crime which in my opinion puts the FDA in the same league of incompetence/industry connivance as the SEC) will cause us to pay a terrible price in the future.
The lobbyists are in firm control of our representatives in congress so nothing will ever be done about deceptive package labeling. And nowhere is there a cry heard to put REAL health education in the curriculum of our schools. How many adults, let alone kids, ever bother the read the ingredients labels on the “foods” they put into their mouths? After all the millions (billions?) spent to warn people about the dangers of smoking, I still see kids on the street being “cool” and puffing away. And now they have the example of a closet chain smoker sitting in the White House. I guess the audacity of his hope is to make sure he gets his free lung transplant down the road.
People scream about “bailouts” to the banks, GM, AIG, etc. But a health care plan such as is being proposed now is another bailout to many people who knowingly are making bad and self destructive choices with regards to their health. Since (by some criteria) more than 50% of the people in this country are obese, they will automatically vote against any serious measure to require reduction of obesity, unless it can be done with a no effort pill (paid for by the government) and taken once a day (even better once a month). Sorry to sound so pessimistic. Of the 32 people who started out in my lifestyle change group of the Diabetes Prevention study, 9 gave up on weight control and exercise and became diabetics within a few years, and 3 became diabetics within the last few years even though they did lose some weight and do some exercise. Many of the others are slowly gaining back to their original weight and showing higher blood sugar numbers, but are still pre-diabetic. Only a handful of participants in my city are still struggling to keep at goal weight and maintaining some serious exercise.
Hey, after all, diabetes is almost fun now, right? Painless blood sample takers, free mobility scooters for diabetics paid for by the government – what more could people ask for?
They’ll ask for the moon if they think it’s for “free”.

 

Indeed! Medicine in the US operates as a Cartel. We don't need socialized medicine to break the cartel and move to a competitive capitalist system, but of course socialized, single-payer would do it!

The best solution, which you have hinted at, is to deregulate. This would allow for prescribing pharmacists and nurses as in other countries. This one step alone has the potential to greatly reduce costs as control of access to medicine is the bread and butter of the expensive U.S. health care system. The FDA acts as the gatekeeper. If you open up access, you break the Cartel, it is that simple. Probably close to 50% of prescription medicines could be safely prescribed by pharmacists and nurses if they had say a year of addition training.

Medical schools are also part of the problem. To qualify for Federal funding these schools need to be forced to expand their student faculty ratios and enrollments, because tightly controlling access to training is another means by which the Cartel maintains control, and a reason why you might have to wait over thirty days for an appointment with a specialist.

Torts need to be Capped. The right to assisted suicide for terminally ill patients needs to be there.

Uniform Federal regulation of insurance companies is needed and they need to be brought under the watchful eye of the Department of Commerce and not permitted to operate in restraint of trade as they are now with helter skelter state regulation. They should have to meet at least the same level of disclosure as other corporations.

I have no problem with an optional government insurance plan so long as it is supported with premiums and not tax subsidies. I'd like to see it make a profit for the Treasury equal to the average return per common share of private, for profit, health insurance companies. Ought to be relatively easy to do if you forgo the sets of alligator luggage for the Board of Directors at Christmas time and the 50 million golden parachute for the CEO, and instead operate with Civil Servants at the top..

 

The fact that these people want to enact laws to change health care (> 15% of the economy) in a matter of weeks indicates, to even the most dim-witted, there is massive skulduggery afoot.

Stay tuned.