Healthcare False Narrative - let the free market fix it !

Repeating what you say, when we both have used relative terms without quantification, you are insulting me for doing so, and I want to point out your hypocrisy in having done the exact same thing, is ABSOLUTELY an argument. Granted that argument does require a bit of intuition on your part because it requires you to put two and two together in order to understand the relevance, and on that measure, perhaps I overestimated your transitive logic.

I am well aware of the concept of a normal bell curve distribution, and am not in need of your elementary explanation of deviation from the mean. I fully grasp the concept of quantifying selective, just as I grasp the concept of quantifying what constitutes a "very high GPA" that in your words create "limitations to supply. The entire point in repeating your words, which obviously went over your head, was to expose the hypocrisy in those words. I replied to your post that made no attempt whatsoever at quantification, without using quantification myself, and then you turn around and are aghast that I did not use quantification. With you, it seems that what is good for the goose is NOT good for the gander. Even after your hypocritical complaining, you still haven't quantified the level that you are advocating ( I guess I could possibly infer 85%)

In truth, I couldn't tell you what is the current deviation from the mean for a doctor, lawyer, or a street sweeper. For that matter I'm still not clear on what aspect you are referring to when discussing deviation from the mean, be it standardized test scores, GPA, IQ etc. In truth, for purposes of this conversation, it does not matter along which parameter you are measuring, because what we are really discussing is philosophy. Should they expand medical schools so that entrance is easier than it is now, thus allowing a much wider pool of people to be doctors and increasing the pool of doctors ? That is the heart of this topic.

My answer would be NO THEY SHOULD NOT.

Do you know what they call the graduate that finishes dead last in his class at the worst rated medical school in the world ?.....Doctor. They call him Doctor.

Aside from a few very high profile opinion leader type doctors, there isn't a delineation that is made in the publics eye when it comes to the term doctor. Regardless of their educational background and GPA, we afford those titled doctor with a great deal of trust and respect. We allow them to make life and death decisions, and assume that they are well versed in what they do. A simple mistake can literally kill someone, and while current doctors occasionally make mistakes, I don't want to lower the bar so that less qualified people are in that role which would logically lead to more rather than less mistakes. Probably more so than any other profession, doctors truly SHOULD be the best and the brightest. To argue otherwise, in my mind, is nonsensical.

I certainly don't want "Mr. or Mrs. 85%" to be MY doctor. Do you ?

 

Hey, Somalia might be for you! No unions, no bloated government - hell, no government at all! Heaven for you, right?

 

The only idiotic thing here is you putting words in my mouth. Quit making stuff up and attributing it to me... don't blame me for your ignorance.

 

You do not even know what the bar is, have no idea how it is set, and yet you speak as if you do .. blindly trusting that the organizations who set the bar are doing so purely on the basis of your good health.

This is abject nonsense on many levels the first of which is that entrance is only the first step - making it through is another.

Second - if you knew what the normal distribution was then why did you make such a nonsensical statement initially - a statement without meaning. Then when I point this out (in a nice way) you repeat my words back to me like you are in kindergarten even though (because you know what the normal distribution is) you knew what I meant.

Then when I do give quantification -showing how your initial statement was irrelevant nonsense - you cry like a baby and run back to the playground to stick head deep in the sands of denial.

The test used to get into medical college is called the MCAT - medical college admission test. Your scores on this test are not the only thing used. They also look at your GPA.

Just as one example - A person's GPA can vary greatly depending on the teacher. Some teachers are tougher than others. GPA is then arbitrary comparison. Some with a high GPA could be far less intelligent than others with a lower GPA.

The MCAT does not test ability to be a good doctor. What does knowledge of physical sciences have to do with being a good doctor in general ? Doctors are not chemists or nuclear physicists. Why is science aptitude in general given such a high priority ?

Then there are people who have photographic or partially photographic memories. These people can regurgitate large volumes of material in a short period of time (allowing them to memorize their way through) but, their long term retention of this material is often not good because they did not understand the concepts.

The idea that someone who has a 3.8 GPA will necessarily be a better doctor than someone who has a 3.5 GPA (both good scores) is abject nonsense. The one with the 3.8 GPA will not necessarily do better in medical school.

The idea that by "slightly" lowering the test score requirements (which are ridiculously high) will let in a bunch of idiots is ignorance.

 

Harvard Medical School and the CDC are wrong?

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/sto...s-annually-linked-to-lack-of-health-coverage/

 

Same day surgery for my 91 year old MIL when she needed a pacemaker so that sure sounds like an "emergency situation" to me.

 

Onus is entirely on you to discredit the Harvard study and the CDC data.

So only the wealthy are allowed to have healthcare because they can afford it and all of your less fortunate fellow Americans can just suffer and die?

Why didn't you provide a credible link for that allegation?

 

You do know that YOUR initial statement did not provide quantification right ? You are acting as if it did. Why is it "irrelevant nonsense" when I dont when replying to you, but perfectly OK for you ? Are you going to answer that ? For that matter you STILL have not provided quantification, with the closest that you have come to doing so being that you mentioned 85%. You didnt actually say 85% of what. 85th percentile in grade point ? No thats not high enough in my opinion. 85th percentile of scores on the MCAT ?....that person would already be eligible for a great many med schools. The truth of the matter is, that after all of this bloviating you have done across several posts at this point, you STILL have not provided quantification. You need to respond to this directly and quote where you have provided quantification, as I said, I saw that you mentioned 85%, but not with much conviction and you didnt even delineate 85% of what. You now are talking about a 3.5 grade point, but thats certainly not 85th percentile, it would be far higher than that.

So a persons grade point can vary by institution and specific teachers, that much is true. Of course, Med Schools do take into account the academic institution where that grade point was earned. This is precisely why they also use the standardized test the MCAT, and use both of those factors in addition to personal interviews to make their final determination. A cutoff needs to be drawn somewhere, and wherever that cutoff is drawn, there will ALWAYS be people on the fringes that just miss the cut. You can play that game all day long no matter where the cutoff is drawn. If a particular school says a 550 on the MCAT is the cutoff, you can always say that the notion that a person with a 540 will not be as good of a doctor as someone with a 550 is "abject nonsense". If they moved the cutoff to 500, you could argue that it is abject nonsense to say that a person with a 500 is going to be better than a person with a 490 etc. A cutoff needs to be drawn somewhere, and wherever that cutoff is drawn, someone like yourself is going to be there whining for the person that just missed the cutoff.

Now you say that "The idea that by "slightly" lowering the test score requirements (which are ridiculously high) will let in a bunch of idiots is ignorance". Slightly lowering the test score? What is slightly ? Is a 3.5 "slightly" lower than a 3.8, which you seem to be implying? I would argue that it isn't, and that the percentile and deviation from the mean would be drastically different between those 2 numbers. You STILL have not quantified what is slightly. For that matter, you STILL have not actually quantified anything. Up until this point you have done a lot of whining about quantification, but have yet to do so yourself. In light of these facts, your position is bizarre to say the very least. I will cajole you again to cut and paste where you think you provided quantification in this discussion. Prove me wrong. My contention is that you have quantified NOTHING.

Your reply needs to start with you cutting and pasting where you think you have provided quantification, and you quantifying what you mean by "slightly lowering grade point". We can proceed from there.

 

Not 'wrong' -- purposely misleading.

Do tell, what part of the body fails from lack of health insurance?

 

Government is the legal use of force. Healthcare should not be done by force.
Tyranny is attempting to do by force of law what cannot, or should not, be done by force at all.

 

Onus is entirely on you to provide credible evidence proving that Harvard and the CDC data was "purposely misleading".

 

What makes you think the whores in washington will do anything but pay their drug and device maker buddies top dollar, while simultaneously raping providers in a sadistic PR stunt ?

Your system will kill the good guys, the guys that actually stay up all night saving your pathetic lives, and reward the guys with enough money to grease the politicians.
It won't do a thing to reign in costs.
Do you not know how our government works? Are you expecting something different this time?

 

Nothing to prove. The fact that you quote the biased report as gospel speaks for itself.

Let me clarify... 45000 people died. 45000 people had no health insurance when they died. Even if that's true, it's a false assumption to state they died from lack of insurance unless you can prove they sought and were denied medical treatment because they had no insurance. Thats the untrue part.

Its a case of liberal institutions feeding liberals what they want them to believe. You took the bait, hook, line & sinker... just dont expect people with working brains to fall for it.












.

 

I recall that prior to the ACA paying for private healthcare was more than my mortgage payment each month so it is perfectly understandable that many people could not afford any healthcare insurance at all.

Then there were exclusions for pre-existing conditions that effectively locked people out of healthcare insurance when they needed it the most.

So no, the only thing that is biased is the bogus belief that no one was dying because they could not afford health insurance.

And the onus is still on YOU to PROVE, using CREDIBLE EVIDENCE, that the CDC data and the Harvard study were misleading.

Harvard and the CDC have credibility. Extremist alt right disinformation does not.

 

No skin off my nose what you believe. Feel free to be led around by politically motivated studies. Its liberal lifeblood.

 

Food for thought (for folks too lazy to do their own research)

• The basis for that statistic is this study that appeared in theAmerican Journal of Public Health in 2009. The study is, in technical terms, garbage. The authors of the study noted insurance status of a group of people in 1993. They followed up in 2001, checking whether they were dead or alive. They found that the group who had been uninsured in 1993 had a higher mortality rate than those who were insured, and from that they calculated that 45,000 people die each year due to lack of insurance.

There was only on problem, which the authors noted near the end of the study:

Our study has several limitation. NHANES III assessed health insurance at a single point in time and did not validate self-reported insurance status.We were unable to measure the effect of gaining or losing coverage after the interview.

In other words the authors had no idea how many people uninsured in 1993 subsequently acquired health insurance. Someone who was uninsured in 1993, got insurance in, say, 1996, and then died in 2000—well, it would be pretty hard to attribute his death to being uninsured, wouldn’t it?

The authors try to pull a fast one with the very next sentence: “Point-in-time uninsurance is associated with subsequent uninsurance.6” In other words, they are suggesting that if a person was in uninsured in 1993, he was likely to be uninsured as well in 1996. And that’s what you would take away if you didn’t look at the study in the footnote.

That study was titled “Health insurance coverage and mortality among the near-elderly.” Here’s what it says:

Among adults who were uninsured in 1992, the proportion of respondents who reported being publicly or privately insured rose progressively in the ensuing four surveys (46.6 percent, 58.4 percent, 66.1 percent, and 74.5 percent), as nearly half reached age sixty-five and became eligible for Medicare by 2000.

Thus, people who are uninsured at one point in time are more likely to be insured in subsequent years. It would be more accurate to say: “Point-in-time uninsurance is associated with a subsequent increase in insurance coverage.”

Final note: Two of the authors of the study purporting to show that 45,000 people die annually due to a lack of insurance are none other than David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler, founding members of the single-payer advocacy group Physicians for a National Health System and authors of other dubious studies. This particular study, though, isn’t even worth the bites it is sucking up in cyber-space.

http://www.conservativeblog.org/amy...ot-die-annually-because-they-are-uninsur.html

 

Companies only sell goods and services to people that can buy them.
A company can set whatever price it wants for its goods and services, but if no one can buy them, it won't sell any.

 

Ironic coming from someone swallowing the extremist alt right disinformation without question.

 

An absolute free market true. But these insane prices and profit margins on med products aren't because of regulations. It's due to a lack of competition because of regulations. They raise the price because they can! Simple as that. So either we reduce regulations, accept lower quality materials and allow free market forces to take over - this ain't gonna happen. OR we regulate how much they can charge. Because it's flat out of control.

Anecdote - Sovaldi in the US runs around 81,000 for a treatment regimen. They charge India 900 UsD per regimen. Both profit for Gilead. You don't see anything unethical about that?

 

An extremist alt right disinformation blog is your "source"?



And that same extremist alt right disinformation source had Jack Abramoff on it's board of directors.

 

Facts are facts. The report has been disproven so many times, its hard to believe anybody still quotes it. Then again, not that hard to believe, considering.

 

Wrong again. Somalia is the way Somalia is because of decades of SOCIALISM, bloody civil war, and the vacuum left behind in its wake.

 

This is a half truth. Because this is a breakthrough drug for Hepatitis C, and because Hepatitis C is rampant in the developing world, the inventor of this drug for humanitarian purposes has foregone their patent protection in the developing world, and allowed other manufacturers to produce a generic version of this medication in the developing world.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...-falling-for-a-superstar-gilead-drug-in-india

For you to call their humanitarian gesture unethical is about as misleading as it gets.

 

Unethical equals 81,000 USD not the gesture. You don't need to charge that much.

 

Well, if it costs over a billion dollars to develop ( which is a realistic number), they have about 12 yrs of patent protection to recoup those costs, it is a rare disease that few have in the first world, and it is a one course of treatment drug, how else do you suggest the developer recoup their investment ? Would it have been better for them to have never developed the drug at all ?

You cannot simply look at a number and then summarily title it unethical. The actual details matter.