Healthcare False Narrative - let the free market fix it !

As stated before, this is a poor comparison.

The belief that if government would just get out of the way things would be better has NEVER materialized. Just look at history.

 

Of course it is difficult enough to limit the supply. As it should be. For that matter, every college degree is difficult enough to limit the supply. "Limit the Supply" in fact is a relative term, and it is rendered meaningless by your usage of it.

 

One it makes no since to tax everyone in the city, for all those living in the suburbs or middle of know where that require a car. and if you drive it is required. Ever heard of an sr22?

Second if you take your broke down car to an automobile shop, it is not required they make it run then send you on your way, so auto shops don't pass that cost onto people that actually pay to get their car fixed.
not so much with healthcare, where hospitals cannot turn anyone away.

 

Requiring people know how to practice medicine before they practice medicine has an upside if you are ever the patient.

 

Then eliminate the monopolies and anti-competitive practices.

You can start by limiting hospital ownership to one per market and prosecute hospitals for colluding to fix prices above Market rates.

 

"Out-of-Network" was created by the American Hospital Association to stifle competition and gain a competitive advantage for monopoly control of the healthcare system during the late 1930s. The AHA's Blue Cross continued the practice when the American Hospital Association created the first health insurance company in 1946, and it continues to be a practice used by Blue Cross, and also by Blue Shield which the AHA ultimately took over as part of its quest for monopoly healthcare.

 

Where does this plan work currently anywhere in the world?

 

You totally misunderstand how Free Market principles apply to medical care and health plan coverage. Worse than that, you fail to to see how the lack of Free Markets in both medical care and health plan coverage drives up the prices.

Contrary to your erroneous assertion, the individual is the costumer, not the doctor.

There was Free Market healthcare up until about 1932, before the American Hospital Association began lobbying State governments for "enabling laws" to skirt insurance regulations.

 

And it exists nowhere successfully now....it just doesn't work

 

Two chapters of my book, Freedom Doesn't Trickle Down, were devoted to this topic; I know enough about it to not embarrass myself. For a more comprehensive review, I recommend When Healing Becomes a Crime, by Ken Ausubel, or A Matter of Life or Death, by Herbert Bailey. All three are available on Amazon.

From the link: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/American_Medical_Association

Eliminating competitors to drug based paradigm
In his 1994 book, The Assault on Medical Freedom, author P. Joseph Lisa gained access to secret files in the AMA's Chicago Department of investigation under the guise of collecting information to expose "mental health quackery." In the process, he uncovered hundreds of AMA photocopies of memos, minutes and other documents. In a subsequent ten year investigation, he found little evidence of "quackery" and much evidence of an organized propaganda campaign to discredit alternative medicine and foreign drugs. The birth of the AMA in 1847 launched an organized push for a "totalitarian medical pharmaceutical police state". Funded by the drug industry, a single, medical monopoly was established using the insurance industry, the U.S. Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the Internal Revenue Service (IRC), the U.S. Postal Service and other state and federal agencies. From the onset, the AMA is characterized as a greed motivated trade union, eliminating competitors to its own financial and political interests. Funded by the Carnegie Foundation, Abraham Flexner was ostensibly empowered to investigate the quality of medical education in all 161 medical schools that existed in 1910. In league with Rockefeller billions, Flexner helped destroy the credibility and funding sources for nearly all schools using non-drug based medicine. 161 medical schools dwindled down to 81 by 1919 and medical graduates declined from 5,747 to 2,658. "Overcrowding" of the profession became the public AMA theme for the "opportunities of those already in the profession to acquire a livelihood."

I encourage you to read the whole article.

From the link: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johngoodman/2014/09/03/the-doctors-union/#7c0740574339

What was the most successful labor union in the 20th century? Ranking high on the list for many economists would be the American Medical Association. Most of us don’t think of the AMA as a union. Technically it isn’t one. But it has been far more successful in achieving benefits for those it represents than just about any of the trade unions that make up the AFL-CIO. Further, the methods employed by the AMA are increasingly being copied in just about every other profession.

See also: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/a...he-american-medical-association-got-rich.aspx

 

You haven't had any semblance of a Free Market since about 1932. It is absurd to suggest that it has been tried in the Modern Era of Medicine. It's not possible for companies to have "had their chance" when the rules were dictated by the federal and State governments.

And yet it is the American Hospital Association (AHA) that has done the most damage to your healthcare system.

 

Of course associations like the AMA and AAMC contribute to the regulatory process ?

https://www.aamc.org/advocacy/washh...ssociationsinrequestinganextensionandcha.html

Why would you bring up a medical staff meeting when it has nothing to do with the fact that medical associations contribute to the regulatory process ?

 

The AMA is a key component of the medical hierarchy; it actually exercises more authority than the government on medical matters.

https://www.ama-assn.org/content/ama-house-delegates

 

Yeah, no. Pruning central govt way back from the ridiculously bloated SQ is not "anarchy," but thanks for being true to form with the LW's favorite, imbecilic "govt cuts = anarchy" fallacy. I had a hunch you'd disappoint in this way after reading some of your other posts.

 

Repeating what I say is not an argument for much

Do you know anything about something called a normal distribution ? It is a shows a distribution of folks on the basis of how far they deviate from the mean (average).

Take for example a test where the mean (average) score is 70%

At the far end (those scoring above 95% = a deviation of 25+ from the mean) you have very few people. If you move to a deviation of 20+ you have more people (those scoring above 90%)

When you say be selective - it means nothing unless you clarify what your definition of "selective" is. We could move the bar to those scoring above 85% and this is still quite selective.

The question under consideration is ... "how much is too selective".

You saying - "they have a right to be selective" does not get us any closer to answering that question. Smart arse.

 

Those numbers were based on false conclusions by researchers.

Don't you get tired of pimping sick children?

Profit is justified, since healthcare resources are limited.

Medical bills were never the "#1 cause of bankruptcies."

Hearing on “Working Families in Financial Crisis: Medical Debt and Bankruptcy”
Tuesday July 17, 2007 1:00 pm
Room 2141 Rayburn House Office Building

Nor is there any evidence that medical bankruptcies are creating any sort of crisis for the bankruptcy system or that the percentage of medical bankruptcies has been rising over time.

A study by Ian Domowitz and Robert Sartain, for instance, find little correlation of medical debt with other sources of financial distress, such as job loss or income interruption.[1] Fay, Hurst, and White find that health problems by the head of a household or spouse that cause missed work are not a statistically significant factor in bankruptcy filings.[2]

[1] Ian Domowitz & Robert L. Sartain, Determinants of the Consumer Bankruptcy Decision, 54 J. Fin. 403, 413 (1999).

[2] Scott Fay et al., The Household Bankruptcy Decision, 92 Am. Econ. Rev. 706, 714 (2002).

Aparna Mathur similarly finds that poor health by the head of the household is not a statistically significant predictor of bankruptcy filings.[2]

She also reports that only six percent of participants in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics survey self-reported that illness or injury caused their bankruptcy filing and statistical analysis found no significant correlation between bankruptcy filings and individuals in poor health.

[1] Scott Fay et al., The Household Bankruptcy Decision, 92 Am. Econ. Rev. 706, 714 (2002).

[2] See Mathur, Medical Bills and Bankruptcy Filings (summarizing findings of PSID).

Most studies find no medical debt at all in about half of consumer bankruptcy filings and in the overwhelming number of cases where medical debt is listed it is relatively small in amount and unlikely to be a significant contributor to the bankruptcy filing.

A recent study of bankruptcy filers by the Department of Justice’s Executive Office of the United States Trustee (USTP) is consistent with the findings of most studies. The USTP examined the records of 5,203 bankruptcy cases filed between 2000 and 2002, the most thorough study of the problem to date of those who actually filed bankruptcy. It reported that 54 percent of the cases in the sample listed no medical debt, meaning that the median amount of medical debt in the study was zero. Medical debt accounted for 5.5 percent of total general unsecured debt and 90.1 percent reported medical debts less than $5,000. There were a few cases where extremely high medical debt likely explained the subsequent filing—one percent of cases accounted for 36.5% of medical debt and less than 10 percent of all cases represented 80% of all reported medical.

Now......about that bogus study from Harvard.....let's look at that.....this is still Congressional Testimony...

First, the finding that half of all bankruptcies are caused by medical problems is based on a fundamentally flawed and over-expansive definition of “medical bankruptcies.”[1] The researchers, for example, count as “medical bankruptcies” such events as gambling addiction, a death in the family, or the birth or adoption of a child, in addition to unexpected illness or injury.

[1] See Mathur (“their classification of a medical bankruptcy is too broad”): Fleming (“the very definition of ‘medical bankruptcy’ in this study is a poor one”); Lemieusx (calling definition of health care bankruptcies “very broad”).

Moreover, although some substance abusers and gamblers are addicts, it is not clear why all those who gamble their way into bankruptcy should be assumed to be gambling addicts and thus classified victims of “medical bankruptcy.”

Moreover, they count as a serious medical problem any accumulation of unpaid medical bills of over $1000 within two years of bankruptcy.

They do not report any evidence on how many filers had substantially more than $1000 in unpaid medical bills, the median amount of medical debt, nor the distribution of debt—even after Dranove and Millenstein specifically identified this methodological flaw.[1] In fact, as noted above the study by the United States Trustee found relatively few filers with substantial medical bills and a very small number of filers with very large medical debts. Himmelsein, et al., provides no reason to question this conclusion that the problem of large medical debts is limited to a relatively few number of filers.[2]

[1] Dranove and Millenstein at p. W77.

[2] The United States Trustee’s office also examined almost three times as many petitions as the Himmelstein study.

They also do not control nor even provide any evidence as to the size of the other obligations of the “medical bankruptcy” filers. Thus, for instance, a debtor with $1001 in unpaid medical bills and $50,000 in student loan debt or tax debt would classify as a medical bankruptcy under the authors’ definition. It is not clear why this hypothetical situation would be classified as a medical bankruptcy.

Finally, they do not attempt to control for the possibility of strategic behavior as part of pre-bankruptcy planning, such as decisions by debtors to pay secured debts, such as mortgages or automobile loans, or nondischargeable unsecured debts, such as student loans, instead of medical debt, which is generally unsecured and dischargeable. Such strategic decisions would tend to inflate the amount of medical debt in bankruptcy relative to its actual proportion outside bankruptcy.

For instance, Mathur reports that in the PSID data she studied, 9 percent of those surveyed self-reported medical bills as the primary reason for filing and 7 percent claimed medical bills as a secondary reason, for a total of 16%.

 

Too bad there is not a requirement for people to have some training in rational thought and logical fallacy prior to posting.

Where did I say or imply that folks who are not trained in medicine should be allowed to practice medicine ... Mr. Strawman ?

 

That would be a good start !

 

I read your signature and figured you'd love the good ole days of pinkerton agents shooting strikers.
"Ridiculously bloated" - hardly. Wall St still gambles unchecked. We no longer have companies like Comcast have to answer consumer complaints to FCC....

 

You were the one complaining about, "I also talk about how various associations such as the AMA restrict entry which keeps supply low and wages high and Gov't regulations which thwart competition." There is no strawman argument in refuting your idiotic assertion that competition is restricted by requiring people to know what the hell they are doing to begin with. I mean I am sure there are some heroin users who are pretty good at finding a vein and all so how dare we keep them out of the drug cabinets and restrict them from spreading their Hep C and HIV and all. Rentseeking I tell you. Pure greed!!!!

 

Nope, it's the PUBLIC unions responsible for most of the poisonous lie narratives we call "the left" I want banned as against public policy.

People are learning all they need to know about private unions and how uncompetitive they make us in the world. They are becoming less and less relevant daily and will be gone soon with no government action whatsoever. The toxic public unions are another matter though. NEA and SEIU need to be abolished yesterday.

 

Good luck with that. Lol

 

Wonder if that's what the Air Traffic Controllers said to Reagan? Hmmm.

The voting public becomes more and more fed up with the corrupt, taxpayer funded raw sewage the public union lie merchants pump out daily. Only a matter of time and more light shined on them by the net. No luck required, none at all.

 

It's ok if you hate the working man.....they hate you as well

 

So fallacious that little reply is needed, repetition suffices.