4 ms·
I hate this line of reasoning. It can be unjustly applied to everything. Your programmer's incentive is to do a half-assed job, so you are more reliant on the
by arn 13y ago
I hate this line of reasoning. It can be unjustly applied to everything.
Your programmer's incentive is to do a half-assed job, so you are more reliant on them for bug fixes and so on. Therefore, no programmer is going to be trying to do a good job or take pride in their work. Everyone is 100% motivated by financial gain.
His doctor may indeed suck, but he should get a new doctor, not write it off as the whole system being stacked against him.
- jpdoctor 13y agoI think you just discovered that when you apply the same line of reasoning to everything everywhere, you get nonsensical results. That's usually why it is best to apply reasoning sensibly. For instance: Your programming example is missing the traditional loans from the cost-of-medical school. It is also missing the middle-man problem of insurance billing. It is also missing the incestuous role that pharmaceutical companies play in "helping" doctors to learn how to diagnose little-understood diseases such as UC. It is better to apply the line of reasoning I gave above to situations where they apply.
- arn 13y agoAnd I think your perspective says more about your personal motivations in your daily life than anything else. There are always going to be some people motivated by money (like perhaps yourself), some by helping others, some by some other measure of personal satisfaction. To say all physicians work on the incentive of personal money is a paranoid view which, in my experience, is grossly simplistic. There are good doctors, and there are bad doctors. It's equally (in)valid to say that everything anyone does in any profession is entirely motivated by financial gain.
- dandelany 13y agoAs seems to be usual on HN these days, you're vastly overreacting. Nowhere did he "say that everything anyone does in any profession is entirely motivated by financial gain". He said "you need to evaluate your doctors' incentives". The fact that someone has an incentive to do X does not mean it's their primary motivation, or even that they're taking it into account. I have a dopamine incentive to eat bacon, but it's not motivating any of my actions today. You're not helping anyone by being unreasonable or putting words in others' mouths.
- lostlogin 13y agoJust to add to this - I know others who have grown disillusioned with the system. With a complex condition the chance that the sufferer has seen just the one doctor is almost zero. A dozen may be an underestimate. If the patient is no better, its hard not to become skeptical as the cost falls only on the sufferer and their family.