Solving the Health Care Crisis Big Government Style
Okay, I give up all this market oriented solution nonsense that offends so many people’s sensibilities. I agree we should go the Big Government route and solve the health care problem by drafting all doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals. The duration of this draft will be (let me see, I’m 40 … so …) 30 years. The salaries of these medical professionals will be that of your standard government employee. For example a medical doctor might be a GS-15 and be paid something like $125,000 a year. This should help put a major dent in the rising costs of health care, and who cares about 40 or 50 years down the road and the negative incentives put in place. In 30 years, I’ll be 70 and close to dying anyways. You 20 somethings and younger, the shortage of doctors this policy creates will be your problem and I just don’t give a crap.
Was there a point to be made here?
MichaelObviously, the answer is yes, and the obvious additional to that point is that you understand exactly what that point is, else you’d have let the whole thing slide right by.
Steve;
It amazes me; We so often hear from Democrats worried about spending our children’s future, when it comes to constitutionally mandated things like for example, defense. Yet, they seem to ahve no problems screwing up the future of our kids with social spending.
While your thinking has greatly improved comrade, there are still serious flaws. Doctors should not be allowed to earn more than factory workers, who are our true back bone. Drug company profits should be confiscated.
Also, we need a secondary system to cater to foreigners in order to earn hard currency. That system will get good equipment and will be fairly sanitary. If the doctors attempt to leave we will put their family members in prison.
Regards,
Micheal Moore
Steve Spielberg
Hillary Clinton
Barrack Obama
John McCain
It’s not so much spending on defense that is the problem, it’s more so spending on Offense.
How is it that social programs like SCHIP and Headstart screw up the future of our kids?
This should help put a major dent in the rising costs of health care
Hmmm. Doubt it. I don’t think salaries for the nurses and doctors are the biggest cost center. Have any data to back up this rant?
Your solution is too free-market, Mr. Verdon. Once people stop opting to go into medicine, we’ll have to start drafting them right out of high school and then educate them to be doctors.
Since this means only people who cannot get out of induction will be our medical professionals, we’ll have plenty of bodies filling the roles, and plenty of bodies created by those in the roles.
Or it could be that Steve was attacking a straw man and thinking that it actually made some point. Nobody is making such a proposal, so pointing out why it’s bad serves no purpose. I could just as easily make a similar straw man based on privatization proposals nobody is making, and it would be just as useless.
That is, after all, the best defense.
. Nobody is making such a proposal,
Really? Sit back and watch, and get back to me in say, Jan’09.
duckspeak,
Headstart has been around a long time and consequently has produced vast amounts of data. We can see how the children are affected as adults. It is utterly useless. No correlation to graduation rates, incarceration rates, employment, income etc.
Apart from that, as a father, I have somehow come to believe that feeding and educating my children is my responsibility, not the government’s. Beyond wasting money, most social programs weaken people by shifting responsibility away from them in an attempt to help them. They end up dependent on things they could do just as well do for themselves.
Oh, see, I didn’t realize that you and Steve had a time machine and were in fact reporting from the future, I thought it was all just a stupid hypothesis.
But certainly I will get back to you in Jan’09, unless you already know from your future escapades that I didn’t, in which case I’m sure I had/will have a valid reason.
Feeding yes, but I somehow doubt you’re qualified to provide your children with a, equally broad and in depth education yourself, surely they’d be better with multiple teachers with specialized study.
It takes resources and incentives away from the productive members of society and wastes them non-producers who become lifetime dependents on government handouts. Sure, a few of those kids will turn out successful, but it will be because of personal initiative rather than the programs.
Steve is dead on right. All you have to do is take a ride on your monkey-driven jet boat through the blasted alkali flats of what used to be Western Europe to see how this all turned out for the worse.
It takes resources and incentives away
He says this with a straight face while we have cash flowing out like the water release in Hoover dam on a daily basis in the Iraq war.
Perspective. Obviously not a requirement.
Much as I might agree with Steve’s underlying principle, I don’t believe that putting a ceiling on physician salaries will cause a shortage of doctors. If there were currently a free market in physician education he might be right but there hasn’t been such a market in the U. S. for more than a century. Back then physician salaries were much, much lower than they are now even adjusting for inflation and we were producing more of them relative to the population.
There are lots of people who’d be happy to practice medicine for $125,000 per year including many who are closed out of the current system and I have no doubt that some of them have the ability to perform the job. Are they as good as the current crop? Maybe not but I’m not sure that having the smartest possible doctors is as important as having doctors who are smart enough.
How single payer health care (or almost any universal healthcare plan) can bring down the economic fabric of the US in ways that the on going useless war, the debt both public and private, and the almost total abandonment of any industry in the US except finance, Insurance, and credit can’t is an open question. But the idea that there can ever be a “free market” in health care when providers are mandated by law to treat people who can’t pay is absurd.
Further … you want more doctors? Easy, pay people for their education so more people can train to be doctors. Reduce the power of the AMA to limit the number of doctors that can practice. Limit the power of the drug lobby by tightening patent laws and funding research. Allow LPs to write scripts, and treat people for common ailments.
Finally make one risk pool for insurance and eliminate for-profit health insurance.
That is, unfortunately, untrue. We graduate roughly 13,000 doctors per year from U. S. med schools. That’s the same number that were graduated 25 years ago, roughly 25% more than were graduated 40 years ago, and fewer than were graduated 110 years ago.
The limiting factor on the number of doctors produced isn’t high tuitions. It’s the number of available positions in med schools and that is controlled by the AMA.
Interesting.
Let’s see. In 1970 we produced roughly 7 million automobiles here. Now we produce roughly 3 million. A substantial drop but not “almost total abandonment”. In 1969 U. S. steel production was valued at $70 billion;in 1998 it was valued at $37 billion (in 1996 dollars)—still a substantial amount.
We produce more agricultural products than we did 40 years ago. We had 180,000 computer programmers 35 years ago; there are at the very least twice that number now and possibly significantly more.
I think there’s something wrong with your assertion. Perhaps you’re confusing the enormous increase in what’s being produced elsewhere with nothing being produced here.
Well, no, we’re simply looking at the history of the thing. Once you do that, such predictions are fairly easy to make, and alarmingly accurate.
Predictions are always easy to make, but you haven’t shown me any reason to believe in your accuracy.
Well, try this; Every place socialism has been tried, it’s failed, often in rather spectacular fashion. THere’s a 1.000 batting average, here. Does that provide you enough confidence in the observation?
PAst this, it’s simple to observe an identify failures in the making, when they travel the same road.
No, because your little history lesson actually has nothing to do with your prediction.
I can predict that someone’s going to propose segregation in Jan,09, and then give evidence that segregation is bad, but that doesn’t actually support my prediction in any way.
Our current defense spending is 4% of GDP. The average of the last 45 years is 5.5%.
Obviously having al Qaeda destroyed in the heart of the new caliphate, the A.Q. Khan network rolled up and Libya’s nuclear arsenal in Tennessee has no value. But how does wasteful spending in one area justify it in another?
Oh, to the contrary; One definition of madness after all, is applying the same failed policy and expecting that the result will be different this time.
Another is ‘liberalism’, but I digress.
Specialized study? Are you familiar with K-12 education in America? Math and science teachers require specialized study, the rest have degrees in education. At any rate I still hire out a large portion of the education. But I’m the one writing the checks, I’m not asking others.
I am much less qualified to feed my children by your definition. Thing is there are these things called grocery stores. Again, I pay for the food, I’m not asking someone else to.
Dude, why are you having a problem with this? You didn’t claim that applying the policy would fail, you claimed that someone would try to apply the policy. Proving the policy to be bad does nothing to support your claim that the policy will be considered.
Prove to me that somebody will be proposing a policy like Steve described sometime in Jan,09, because that is what you claimed.
Ok, you’ve got me there. Would be nice if every teacher had specialization in the topic they teach though, wouldn’t it? I know from my experience, those teachers who did were given more attention by their students than those who didn’t.
Hey, I pay my taxes too. But while buying food only directly benefits me and those who eat it, educating future generations benefits more than just the students and their parents. Just because somebody doesn’t have children, doesn’t mean they are not receiving a benefit from the education of someone else’s children.
Quite so. Just look at the utter failure of government provided health care in the US Armed Forces. Oh wait, that is actually a pretty big success story.
anjin-san, don’t forget the alkali flats in Western Europe. Remember? Where all the people who stayed died because their health care was so bad? You remember the boatloads of refugees from France and Germany we had to take in for years before that, right?
Just wanted to add a thought. Since the start of the Iraq war, we have heard a lot about the remarkable advances in battlefield medicine. And just think, its government provided health care at work.
More proof that government can’t do anything right and that socialized medicine is an utter failure. Why don’t the morons on the left understand?????
All you have to do is take a ride on your monkey-driven jet boat through the blasted alkali flats of what used to be Western Europe to see how this all turned out for the worse.
That is pretty damn funny.
Anjin-san, so by definition everything the government does is socialism? Or should we treat everyone like they are in the military to give them health benefits? WTF? Over.
Anyway, ever read those stories about neglect at Walter Reed last year in the Washington Post? Or was that just hack journalism? Did you catch the congressional hearings recently highlighting the inadequacy of medical care for returning soldiers? Or was that just Democratic hack politics?
Front line medical care in the military for trauma is top notch and unsurpassed by any other military or civilian practice in the world. I’m not sure that is true universally for all medical care in the military, though I think it is generally pretty good, grandstanding media shows and political circuses notwithstanding. Battlefield deaths are way down, but there is a concomitant increase in serious long term care needs that I’m not sure we have fully stepped up to yet. The sooner the better for those who voluntarily put themselves in harm’s way.
And yet, that’s still a very different animal than, say, Hillarycare. Or is it Obamacare now? I do feel I owe a debt to those who served and have no problem being taxed to pay it. I don’t feel quite the same sense of indebtedness to everyone else just because they are fortunate enough to live in America. And I suppose it would be xenophobic to say that those here illegally generate an even lower sense of entitlement when it comes to raising my taxes.
From the Army Times
Walter Reed is a story about the effects of privatizing government responsibilities.
Silly Marxist Democrats, go smoke more dope.
“More proof that government can’t do anything right and that socialized medicine is an utter failure.”
Complete straw man. No one ever said the government can’t do anything right. What the government can’t do is coddle increasing numbers of mindless users while continuously squeezing a decreasing numbers of producers.
Walter Reed is a story about the effects of privatizing government responsibilities.
I thought it was about government mismanaging privatization. But that can’t be right because the government does things better just because they are the government.
Go back a few posts, that is pretty much exactly what Bithead was saying.
You are going to pay for them one way or another, why not try it in a more intelligent manner than forcing them into ERs for non-emergent care?
I see Bithead observing that socialist governments are overt failures and that dovetails with my point nicely. I don’t see where he says anywhere that government can’t do anything right.
As I said, complete straw man.
To quote Bit, June 4, from “Forced Public Trasit” thread:
Tell me Charles, what happens if, God forbid, a catastrophic illness or accident befalls you or someone you love? Hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical bills. Insurance won’t cover it all. Perhaps 24 hour nursing is required, maybe a retrofit of your home for a wheelchair. Travel to see specialists.
Perhaps you have the means to cover all that despite lost income if you can’t work. But I doubt if more that 4 or 5 percent of the people in this country do. And if you think it can’t happen in your family, think again.
Who do you think ends up footing the bill when this happens, if it happens to you? Why all of us do. And I for one, am ok with paying a few extra buck to ensure that you, or your next door neighbor, or the guy across the street from we would get what they need if struck by tragedy.
I put out 25k a year in after tax dollars to help care for relatives that are seriously ill. It is nowhere near enough to cover the total costs. Without government assistance they probably both would have died for lack of sufficient medical care. Is that the kind of country you really want America to be?
What, after all is the point of having a common society? We are stronger together than we are apart. We provide for the common defense, which protects the very basic need to stay alive. Well we need medical care to stay alive as well. Is this so different?
To quote Bit from the same post:
“For one thing, it’s a non Sequitur. Because I want to keep a chockehold on the tool that is government does not of itself mean what you suggest.”
So you set up a straw man and when you got caught you referred me to a post where you had been caught setting up the same straw man a few days ago. And that’s your defense?
I am not presenting a “defense”. Just pointing out that Bit was arguing that “government”, our government “Can’t get it done”, which is obviously patent nonsense as it is simple to present cases where our government does get it done.
Thats what he said. The meaning is pretty plain. End of discussion.
Michael and Bithead, why not just make a bet, for, say, $50? If in Jan ’09, Obama is proposing to draft all doctors into forced work and cap their salaries at $125K, then Bithead wins. Otherwise, Michael wins.
Sounds like a pretty safe bet to me. How about it Bit?
So, you want what he actually said to mean only what you want to hear and then end the “discussion?”
Pretty damn pathetic. Swallow your pride, admit you went cherry picking, misunderstood and/or misrepresented his argument and let it go.