On Healthcare
Before I had my health insurance provided by Commonwealth (gotta love a company that doesn't make you wait 90 days for coverage after being hired full-time) it was costing $150+ a month to keep me insured. The worst part of this was the fact that I NEVER visit the doctor unless I absolutely have to and was basically wasting $150+ a month on insurance that I didn't use. But the moment I'd stop paying for insurance is when something might happen, so I'm forced to maintain that insurance protection. So what makes medical insurance so expensive? Simple: It's the Lawyers and their clients who have continually sued doctors to the point where it's prohibitively expensive to practice medicine.
So you go to have a nose job, a admittedly cosmetic procedure, and the doctor makes a mistake and makes your old schnozz into a ski-jump when you wanted a button, what do you do? If you're American, you sue for $2,500,000 despite the fact that you would've never made that kind of money in your lifetime. Even if your medical mistake was on something more damaging to your lifestyle, you'd still be able to sue for an obscene amount of money far outstretching what you would have without that medical mistake. So in essence, these people benefit from a medical mistake. But the Lawyers are even worse, following ambulances in the off chance that there is a possible lawsuit that they can take their 15% to grow rich off of the physical misery of one and the professional misery of another.
So what's the solution? How about a state health-care system? Make it so if you go to a private doctor, you run the risk of mistakes and cannot sue for malpractice. If mistakes are made in a state-run Dr's office, the person would still not be able to profit financially, but the government would compensate the victim accordingly. Instead of letting juries decide (because juries are a highly flawed way of deciding justice), we should take the power away from the most manipulative of lawyers and give the power to the level-headed bureaucrats. I'm sorry, but I'd much rather have the best and brightest minds going into medicine instead of scaring them away with malpractice insurance and lawsuits.
Fewer and fewer people are going to medical school these days because of the high amount of education requirements (you're over 30 by the time you've become a real doctor) and the shrinking profit margins. It used to be that going to medical school was a ticket to wealth, but not anymore. Most doctors have to struggle to stay afloat if they aren't someone like James Andrews (famous sports surgeon), and that scares a lot of potentially great doctors away from the profession. By making someone spend 4 years as an undergrad, then 5-8 years in med school, internship and residency before becoming an actual doctor, it's really hard to motivate a bio-chemical engineer to pass up $45,000 as a 23 year old college grad when he wouldn't make that until he was over 30 as a doctor. That's not to mention the hundreds of thousands in student loans that most aspiring doctors have to pay back.
So what's the solution? Why not go back to apprenticeships? Let med students begin to practice medicine at an actual doctor's office as a freshman in college. Start them off as an observer, getting hands-on only when there is no serious danger. Let them gradually take over more duties and eventually they will be able to practice more and more. This way the exceptionally gifted can become doctors at a younger age than 30 and they can gain experience while at an age much more open to taking in new information. Let the doctors they work under supervise their advancement, when ready to practice full-time, let the doctor sign off and give them a certification. That doctor would be fully responsible for the student until he became fully licensed by the state. But let them practice while in school, because most med students will admit that the moment they started practicing medicine it was like they had to learn everything they did on the spot. The education is important, but experience is key.
Doogie Howser would be proud. There's actually a couple of Indian doctors who have been licensed as teenagers ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akrit_Jaswal , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balamurali_Ambati ) In both cases, these were prodigies who were allowed to practice at their own pace, and these are the doctors who will eventually cure AIDS or Cancer. Think having 13 years of experience when you're 30 wouldn't put you head and shoulders above everyone else? So imagine how much better our health would be (not to mention the economy, considering the fact that people are continually getting pay-cuts or layed-off because of high healthcare costs) if we nationalized it. It's only a matter of time before the rising cost of healthcare devastates our economy or even worse, the public health. Our emergency rooms are already over-crowded, and as the baby boomers retire and age we're facing a major crisis. We'll see experienced doctors retire and all kinds of new senior citizens emerge in our understaffed hospitals. Only the rich will receive treatment and the rest will be left out to dry. So we can either face that situation, or we can just raise taxes a little, put restrictions on lawsuits and eliminate the need for doctors to pay for malpractice insurance. If we did the latter, we might be able to avert the coming crisis.
So you go to have a nose job, a admittedly cosmetic procedure, and the doctor makes a mistake and makes your old schnozz into a ski-jump when you wanted a button, what do you do? If you're American, you sue for $2,500,000 despite the fact that you would've never made that kind of money in your lifetime. Even if your medical mistake was on something more damaging to your lifestyle, you'd still be able to sue for an obscene amount of money far outstretching what you would have without that medical mistake. So in essence, these people benefit from a medical mistake. But the Lawyers are even worse, following ambulances in the off chance that there is a possible lawsuit that they can take their 15% to grow rich off of the physical misery of one and the professional misery of another.
So what's the solution? How about a state health-care system? Make it so if you go to a private doctor, you run the risk of mistakes and cannot sue for malpractice. If mistakes are made in a state-run Dr's office, the person would still not be able to profit financially, but the government would compensate the victim accordingly. Instead of letting juries decide (because juries are a highly flawed way of deciding justice), we should take the power away from the most manipulative of lawyers and give the power to the level-headed bureaucrats. I'm sorry, but I'd much rather have the best and brightest minds going into medicine instead of scaring them away with malpractice insurance and lawsuits.
Fewer and fewer people are going to medical school these days because of the high amount of education requirements (you're over 30 by the time you've become a real doctor) and the shrinking profit margins. It used to be that going to medical school was a ticket to wealth, but not anymore. Most doctors have to struggle to stay afloat if they aren't someone like James Andrews (famous sports surgeon), and that scares a lot of potentially great doctors away from the profession. By making someone spend 4 years as an undergrad, then 5-8 years in med school, internship and residency before becoming an actual doctor, it's really hard to motivate a bio-chemical engineer to pass up $45,000 as a 23 year old college grad when he wouldn't make that until he was over 30 as a doctor. That's not to mention the hundreds of thousands in student loans that most aspiring doctors have to pay back.
So what's the solution? Why not go back to apprenticeships? Let med students begin to practice medicine at an actual doctor's office as a freshman in college. Start them off as an observer, getting hands-on only when there is no serious danger. Let them gradually take over more duties and eventually they will be able to practice more and more. This way the exceptionally gifted can become doctors at a younger age than 30 and they can gain experience while at an age much more open to taking in new information. Let the doctors they work under supervise their advancement, when ready to practice full-time, let the doctor sign off and give them a certification. That doctor would be fully responsible for the student until he became fully licensed by the state. But let them practice while in school, because most med students will admit that the moment they started practicing medicine it was like they had to learn everything they did on the spot. The education is important, but experience is key.
Doogie Howser would be proud. There's actually a couple of Indian doctors who have been licensed as teenagers ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akrit_Jaswal , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balamurali_Ambati ) In both cases, these were prodigies who were allowed to practice at their own pace, and these are the doctors who will eventually cure AIDS or Cancer. Think having 13 years of experience when you're 30 wouldn't put you head and shoulders above everyone else? So imagine how much better our health would be (not to mention the economy, considering the fact that people are continually getting pay-cuts or layed-off because of high healthcare costs) if we nationalized it. It's only a matter of time before the rising cost of healthcare devastates our economy or even worse, the public health. Our emergency rooms are already over-crowded, and as the baby boomers retire and age we're facing a major crisis. We'll see experienced doctors retire and all kinds of new senior citizens emerge in our understaffed hospitals. Only the rich will receive treatment and the rest will be left out to dry. So we can either face that situation, or we can just raise taxes a little, put restrictions on lawsuits and eliminate the need for doctors to pay for malpractice insurance. If we did the latter, we might be able to avert the coming crisis.
posted by Dan Pasternack at 3:27 PM
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