re: What if everything is wrong with healthcare

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Here in Shreveport the charity hospital was called Confederate. That had to be changed so it went to LSU. Now it's University. Tomorrow it might be MLK. But it's the hospital for people with no money or insurance.

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University is also the best place to go in the area if you are a trauma patient or burned, insurance or not.

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Willis Knighton is a non-profit. It is NOT a charity hospital. Poor folks don't go there unless it's the ER. And poor people do go to the ER there because it's nicer than the charity hospital.

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You sure WK is non-profit? Pretty sure they are a for-profit operation.

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But it sure as hell isn't a 'market' system. If it were people would pay for service out of pocket or buy insurance. If you have neither your options are friends, family, church, lie in the gutter and die while thinking of all the stupid decisions you made to get yourself into this situation.

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Thank god we don't have that situation. I kinda like not being a third world country.

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It's part of it. The overall cost of the whole behemoth is the problem.

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I know it's been discussed before, but you're not taking into account the massive debt that most young physicians accrue from the high cost of tuition combined with years of schooling/training without being able to earn more than about minimum wage until residency is completed. I'm in my mid thirties, and all my non-physician friends are head and tails in front of me when it comes to financial standing.

I'm not complaining, because I knew what I was getting into, with the expectation that I'll eventually be doing well in the longer run. I just don't think many people realize how difficult it is to make it to that point.

For argument sake, there are a few things that I think are low-hanging fruit that can drop costs dramatically. I know these things will probably never happen, but I'll throw them out there.
1) More physician-friendly malpractice laws: without the threat of malpractice looming, you'd see a huge decrease in the number of tests ordered on patients. Anyone who has ever worked in the healthcare industry knows this to be the case.
2) Universal EMR that is accessible from any qualified healthcare facility. Patients bouncing around to different healthcare systems leads to duplicate tests and unnecessary procedures that drive up costs considerably.
3) Government subsidized medications for common ailments like hypertension, diabetes, high cholesterol. Also make it easier to refill these meds without renewal from a physician. You'd be surprised how many people come to the ED and get admitted for preventable complications because they ran out of their meds and couldn't get an appointment to get refills or simply couldn't afford them.
4) Stronger push for palliative care options for patients with terminal illnesses. We spend the majority of our healthcare dollars (one figure I saw quoted as much as 50%) on people in the final six months of their lives.
5) (my pipe dream) Hospitals would have the right to deny care to certain individuals who continuously cause themselves issues because of self-injurious behavior. Maybe a three strikes and you're out rule or something.

The debt from school, along with the years of investment for education and the incremental climb to relevance as a real doctor has a lot to do with healthcare providers unwillingness to challenge the system and buck the status-quo once they've achieved a position of power in the field.

On #3, didn't I read somewhere that there was a plan to allow pharmacists to prescribe certain preventative drugs?

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So you start a thread implying there's some vast conspiracy distorting the way people think about health care,

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How is the OP implying a vast conspiracy?

People spend a lot of time talking about who should pay for healthcare. Instead, I'd like people to spend more time questioning the nature of healthcare -- what it really is, why, what it could be ect.

I'm calling for people to approach the topic from a perspective unrelated to sport politics, instead from a philosophical and critical thought perspective.

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2) Universal EMR that is accessible from any qualified healthcare facility. Patients bouncing around to different healthcare systems leads to duplicate tests and unnecessary procedures that drive up costs considerably.

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This seems like a no-brainer. We have this for vaccinations and it works great. Seems like a similar system for all records should be a high priority.

Education is definitely virtually entirely wrong. The system. The pricing.

It's interesting how all of these things play into each other.

Healthcare -- food industry -- education -- and so on.

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healthcare providers unwillingness to challenge the system and buck the status-quo once they've achieved a position of power in the field.

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That is a sadly uninformed perspective.

If there is one group which, if unleashed, could and would "challenge the system" it's postgrad healthcare providers. Over the past 40 yrs, Congress placed severe restrictions on the power of MD's to "challenge the system". Those restrictions began in the 1970's with partitioning of Medicare, proceeded next with Stark Laws, encouragement of CONs, restrictions on residencies, refusal to pursue tort reform, and recently advanced them yet further with Obamacare and CMS regs.

Those challenges are not really the challenges I'm after.

As we see here, and in almost all industries, people are often biased and protective of the industry they participate in.

This isn't a debatable thing -- it's the way it is.

People who are responsible and make good life choices don't have a problem with it.