4 ms·

You seem to be right, that would be what is happening. So, how do we mass produce medicine?

by tomjen2 17y ago

nostrademons 17y ago
One-size-fits-all cures. You can buy a treatment, but whether or not that treatment works for your disease is your own responsibility. Let the buyer beware - if you die, it's your own damn fault. Medicine's not the only industry that faces this problem. Education also requires that the product be tailored to the customer. Except in the public education system, the government did try to mass produce it, having standard curricula that all students must learn, and if it's not appropriate for your brain, that's your own damn fault. Go drop out of school or something. Those of us who went through the public school system know how that turned out...
gaius 17y ago
Mass producing medicine is easy. Mass discovering and FDA-approving new medicines is the hard part.
- rsheridan6 17y ago
  That wouldn't help with costs anyway. You'd be paying about as much for a bunch of new patented drugs - actually more if they were good enough to get you to switch from generics. You might get better treatment, but not cheaper treatment.
- yummyfajitas 17y ago
  You can mass produce pills, but you can't mass produce prescriptions for the pills. The cost of getting a doctor's permission won't go down regardless of how cheap drugs are.
frig 17y ago
Easiest solution is to embark on a serious 10-year plan to double-and-then-triple the number of newly-created mds passing through the system. This can't be done immediately -- it'd take time for institutions to ramp up their teaching staff and associated facilities -- but it could be done over time. Some federal program that'd make funds available on condition of a particular school hitting a particular # of enrollments would the simplest solution; given a choice between mad money and placating the AMA boffins most administrators would take the money. There's no real shortage of people capable of being decent physicians; most of the selectivity of medical school admissions is b/c the # of slots the schools allow is low.
- matrix 17y ago
  Physician supply is a long, long way down the list of fundamental issues with US healthcare. Right now, we as a nation have bigger fish to fry - such as making the moral decision on whether we as a society feel healthcare should be a right or a privilege, and getting the right alignment between economic incentives and effective healthcare.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - frig 17y ago
    If we're talking about mass-producing medicine you need more physicians at some point. Your larger points may hold but I think you're underestimating the need for more physicians in the future. There's firstly the obvious aging-population demographic; the older people get the more health care they'll want and thus if you hold the population of physicians constant (as a % of the overall populace) the demands upon the for physicians' attention will become greater as time moves forward; you might say "so hire more nurse practitioners!" but I suspect that won't be the answer, and I think that'll be clear after the next point. The second point is that as medical knowledge has increased over the years medicine itself has gotten much more complicated. Problems that had no answer can now be examined and more-complicated disease mechanisms and cross-interactions (etc.) can be looked at. This is particularly true in gerontological settings -- old people have lots of problems mutually-compounding each other -- but it's complicated problems aren't the unique purview of the elderly. To practice future medicine well will require more time and attention on the physician's part; getting that time back in the face of increasing demand for physician's time probably requires more physicians, doing more-thorough work on fewer patients. And even in the present day most major teaching hospitals only really get by by slave-driving their residents; get rid of the residents and there's not enough doctors available at prices the institutions can afford to keep the hospitals working at full capacity.
  - yummyfajitas 17y ago
    No, physician supply is a fundamental issue. The price of medicine is high in part because of scarcity: there are (doctor's working hours) x (number of doctors) doctor hours available for consumption. People desire more doctor-hours than exist, hence some rationing mechanism is needed. By increasing the number of doctor-hours (either increase number of doctors or doctor working hours) you can reduce the scarcity. You can't eliminate scarcity simply by making a moral choice.
nradov 17y ago
Same way as any other service industry: standardize and automate. You can't automate much of the physician to patient interaction, but there are a lot of ancillary activities such as record keeping and billing which currently create huge costs for no direct benefit in patient care. Most of that clerical work could potentially be automated.

You seem to be right, that would be what is happening. So, how do we mass produce medicine?

by tomjen2 17y ago

You seem to be right, that would be what is happening. So, how do we mass produce medicine?

One-size-fits-all cures. You can buy a treatment, but whether or not that treatment works for your disease is your own responsibility. Let the buyer beware - if you die, it's your own damn fault. Medicine's not the only industry that faces this problem. Education also requires that the product be tailored to the customer. Except in the public education system, the government did try to mass produce it, having standard curricula that all students must learn, and if it's not appropriate for your brain, that's your own damn fault. Go drop out of school or something. Those of us who went through the public school system know how that turned out...

gaius 17y ago

Mass producing medicine is easy. Mass discovering and FDA-approving new medicines is the hard part.

rsheridan6 17y ago
That wouldn't help with costs anyway. You'd be paying about as much for a bunch of new patented drugs - actually more if they were good enough to get you to switch from generics. You might get better treatment, but not cheaper treatment.
yummyfajitas 17y ago
You can mass produce pills, but you can't mass produce prescriptions for the pills. The cost of getting a doctor's permission won't go down regardless of how cheap drugs are.

frig 17y ago

Easiest solution is to embark on a serious 10-year plan to double-and-then-triple the number of newly-created mds passing through the system. This can't be done immediately -- it'd take time for institutions to ramp up their teaching staff and associated facilities -- but it could be done over time. Some federal program that'd make funds available on condition of a particular school hitting a particular # of enrollments would the simplest solution; given a choice between mad money and placating the AMA boffins most administrators would take the money. There's no real shortage of people capable of being decent physicians; most of the selectivity of medical school admissions is b/c the # of slots the schools allow is low.

matrix 17y ago
Physician supply is a long, long way down the list of fundamental issues with US healthcare. Right now, we as a nation have bigger fish to fry - such as making the moral decision on whether we as a society feel healthcare should be a right or a privilege, and getting the right alignment between economic incentives and effective healthcare.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- frig 17y ago
  If we're talking about mass-producing medicine you need more physicians at some point. Your larger points may hold but I think you're underestimating the need for more physicians in the future. There's firstly the obvious aging-population demographic; the older people get the more health care they'll want and thus if you hold the population of physicians constant (as a % of the overall populace) the demands upon the for physicians' attention will become greater as time moves forward; you might say "so hire more nurse practitioners!" but I suspect that won't be the answer, and I think that'll be clear after the next point. The second point is that as medical knowledge has increased over the years medicine itself has gotten much more complicated. Problems that had no answer can now be examined and more-complicated disease mechanisms and cross-interactions (etc.) can be looked at. This is particularly true in gerontological settings -- old people have lots of problems mutually-compounding each other -- but it's complicated problems aren't the unique purview of the elderly. To practice future medicine well will require more time and attention on the physician's part; getting that time back in the face of increasing demand for physician's time probably requires more physicians, doing more-thorough work on fewer patients. And even in the present day most major teaching hospitals only really get by by slave-driving their residents; get rid of the residents and there's not enough doctors available at prices the institutions can afford to keep the hospitals working at full capacity.
- yummyfajitas 17y ago
  No, physician supply is a fundamental issue. The price of medicine is high in part because of scarcity: there are (doctor's working hours) x (number of doctors) doctor hours available for consumption. People desire more doctor-hours than exist, hence some rationing mechanism is needed. By increasing the number of doctor-hours (either increase number of doctors or doctor working hours) you can reduce the scarcity. You can't eliminate scarcity simply by making a moral choice.

nradov 17y ago

Same way as any other service industry: standardize and automate. You can't automate much of the physician to patient interaction, but there are a lot of ancillary activities such as record keeping and billing which currently create huge costs for no direct benefit in patient care. Most of that clerical work could potentially be automated.