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The fundamental problem to solve, though, is getting money back out of medicine. American doctors get paid ridiculous amounts more than doctors in other develop
by vacri 10y ago
The fundamental problem to solve, though, is getting money back out of medicine. American doctors get paid ridiculous amounts more than doctors in other developed nations. If you want affordable medicine, then medical salaries are going to have to take a hit, so you can afford more staff overall.
An example of how much money is in the system: I was talking to a nurse in the US whose adult son had a series of mental illnesses. She was going to see a specialist neurologist about one of them. "Why not ask him about all of them?", asks I. Turns out that in the US, it's quite common for specialists to specialise into a single syndrome, and will happily reject similar things in their field that aren't their specialty. I was horrified - here are people that take a decade and a half of training, all to become a glorified lookup table. I used to work in a neuro lab myself, and while I could see a motor neuron specialist perhaps referring on a brain problem to someone more suitable, the idea that any of the doctors would only take patients with a single, prediagnosed syndrome... was just alien.
But in the US you can do that, and get ridiculous amounts of money for it.
- alkonaut 10y agoUS doctors are paid more because they take risks (they have expensive education, handle expensive treatments etc) If an MD cost zero to get, doctors would still be paid well, but not crazy well.
- srean 10y agoI will believe it a little bit more once the number of people who has the right to practice is not artificially capped.
- vacri 10y ago'handle expensive treatments'? What, unlike doctors everywhere else? Apart from the education costs, what is different? The US also takes in a lot of foreign-trained doctors, who don't have those same education costs.
- alkonaut 10y agoThe costs involved are higher (though or course of the same magnitude), but money seems ever present e.g the concept of malpractice insurance. Foreign doctors can certainly help lower salaries for doctors but they need to be a large fraction, if they are a small fraction they'll just enjoy the high salaries of their US educated peers.
- shados 10y agoAnd that hits the point that the US is very different in a lot of ways, and changing one of those things without changing the others is difficult. Its harder to make health care cheaper because of the salaries, drug cost, hospital costs, etc. A lot of those things are expensive because of education costs, housing cost, etc. And don't forget the lawyer happy culture that raises costs too. Then once you fix that, you have to take into account the added cost of the current poor demographic, illegal immigration, etc. Then when you fix that...etc etc etc. Its a very complicated net of problems. Its not as simple as "LOL wave a wand and make it free". It's made worse in that you have to kick down some people a few notches to have similar taxes (upper middle class would get taxed way more) combined with how a lot of people moved to the US because they did better $$ money with low taxes, and you'll have a lot of pissed off people. Yes, all that needs to happen eventually, but it's very painful to actually do.