I think sometimes what drives doctors' salaries is their fear of being sued. In nations with national health care of varying types, there are much less malpractice suits. The reason we Americans sue much more in tort cases is because we are conditioned to recognize there is nobody to help us. Just as wrongful term cases go down when there is at least 35% or more in unions, and people go through grievance procedures, I think docs can be cajoled into taking a little less if they don't have to pay three people doing insurance and billing, and find people less likely to sue since they know their medical bills are not going to be a problem. People don't like suing their docs, but have to be talked into it, or if the doc acts too coldly when they complain.
1. Everybody loves the Kaiser, which can treat people better AND do better cost control because the Kaiser both pays and provides. The system is much less adversarial, and most physicians are happy with it.
2. The insurance companies seem to have the same role as the Jews in medieval Poland. They work between the pani and the peasants. When the peasants get angry at their oppression, the pani blame the Jews. A few pogroms later, back to business as usual, with fewer living Jews.
I think sometimes what drives doctors' salaries is their fear of being sued. In nations with national health care of varying types, there are much less malpractice suits. The reason we Americans sue much more in tort cases is because we are conditioned to recognize there is nobody to help us. Just as wrongful term cases go down when there is at least 35% or more in unions, and people go through grievance procedures, I think docs can be cajoled into taking a little less if they don't have to pay three people doing insurance and billing, and find people less likely to sue since they know their medical bills are not going to be a problem. People don't like suing their docs, but have to be talked into it, or if the doc acts too coldly when they complain.
Tort reform will be essential to health care reform.
Two comments:
1. Everybody loves the Kaiser, which can treat people better AND do better cost control because the Kaiser both pays and provides. The system is much less adversarial, and most physicians are happy with it.
2. The insurance companies seem to have the same role as the Jews in medieval Poland. They work between the pani and the peasants. When the peasants get angry at their oppression, the pani blame the Jews. A few pogroms later, back to business as usual, with fewer living Jews.
As I told someone else here, I've always heard good things about Kaiser.
So who should he have killed instead?
Probably will be ineffective, sure, but so is working through the Democratic Party, voting for third parties, and everything else that I know of.
The choices are bad, but they are not always equally bad, and it remains incumbent upon us to figure out which is least bad.