3 ms·
To put it in more tech-industry terms, doctors are either Level 2 (general practitioners) or Level 3 (specialists) health support. Adding more low-cost Level 1
by solatic 9y ago
To put it in more tech-industry terms, doctors are either Level 2 (general practitioners) or Level 3 (specialists) health support. Adding more low-cost Level 1 health support is a great way to reduce the workloads of L2 and L3 and thus both reduce costs throughout the system as well as improve outcomes for most ~customers~ patients.
- 0xbear 9y agoExcept of course no one in this system is interested in reducing costs.
- flukus 9y agoThe patients, governments and private insurers are all interested in it I assume. Personally I'm more interested in increasing availability, when I need a medical certificate for a cold it's a huge pain to try and book a doctor. And then 99% of my interactions are watching them fill in paperwork and take my blood pressure, something we already rely on nurses for in hospitals. I don't know if it will get anywhere though, doctors have a powerful union.
- 0xbear 9y agoGovernment is interested in whatever their donors tell them to be interested in. That's why ACA is a trillion dollar giveaway to healthcare industry instead of net savings. ACA also disincentives private insurers from wanting to reduce cost. Their profit is now limited to a certain percentage of the premiums, so naturally their only real way to profit is by raising the living shit out of the premiums.
- flukus 9y agoThings weren't heading that way before the ACA and they aren't heading there anywhere else in the western world. Whatever problems you have with the ACA, it's not the cause here.
- 0xbear 9y agoI didn't say it was the cause. The cause is that the congressmen/women will sell their mom for a buck.
- inopinatus 9y agoSorry to burst your bubble: this works in the tech industry because the impact of a bad judgment call at L1 is not the death of a human being.
- solatic 9y agoAnd nobody's saying that L1 health support should be uneducated (no dedicated schooling), unaided (no need for patient records indicating allergies etc.), or all-powerful (including, say, the ability to prescribe powerful doses). The argument is that there's plenty of room for people who went through a (significant) fraction of the time it takes to complete traditional medical school to earn a (significant) fraction of a doctor's earnings in order to reduce overall system costs and improve overall availability of care.
- inopinatus 9y agoThat argument comes from the wrong direction. It may indeed reduce system costs and improve overall availability, but those things are crippled by the commercial construction of US healthcare not the expense of doctors salaries. Fix that by adopting healthcare systems from overseas, rather than increasing the mortality rate.
- flukus 9y agoCountries with socialized healthcare are facing the same issue, ballooning healthcare costs, just less acutely.
- inopinatus 9y agoThat is wrong. For example, the UK's cost of healthcare as a percentage of GDP is actually declining. The US has double the healthcare expenditure by %age of GDP vs comparable nations such as the UK or Australia, and this order-of-magnitude difference is entirely explainable as systematic inefficiencies of the insurance-led market and uncontrolled drug pricing. All that cost - and it doesn't even cover everyone. Future generations will study the basket case that is today's US non-single-payer insurance system and write it up under chapter titles like "What the hell were they thinking" and "How not to do it".