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@jkerian You stated tat Medicare and Medicaid were the major causes of the ridiculously inflated prices of health care today. I don't see any evidence of this in your answer.
@jkerian ":53623314 You stated tat Medicare and Medicaid were the major causes of the ridiculously inflated prices of health care today. I don't see any evidence of this in your answer." This as no corollary in real medicine. I don't know were you got this idea that doctors choose equipment based on the highest cost. I have to say it's nonsense, having had to decide on medical equipment for my office.
@jkerian Again, a non-sequitur. I ave no problem with punishing bad doctors, nor with making their medical malpractice insurers pay for a good doctor's bad choices. I used to do medical malpractice work for bot plaintiffs and defendants, because someone as to have the best interests at heart of the patient who was wronged. This is a reason for cover-your-ass costs of medicine, but not a major one. If most medicine was cover-your-ass-style, I'd say there was a real problem.
In my hospitalization, there was one instance of CYA, and that was a CT of the head when I was puking my guts out because of the morphine IV I was being given for pain. Morphine is very well known for the nausea it causes. I didn't want a CT of the ead, I knew it would be negative; I couldn't stop throwing up because of the morphine. That added $365 to my total hosp. bill of $190,900+. A drop in the bucket.
It seems to me you just want to dump your biases into this discussion without proof.
@RoryAlsop See, these are very good examples of things that are wrong with US medical care. For example, transport is unregulated. An ambulance ride can be anywhere between 1-10K. It's unregulated in most parts of te country.
"While the federal government sets reimbursement rates for patients on Medicare, it does not regulate ambulance fees for patients with private insurance. Those patients are left with a highly fragmented system in which the cost of a similar ambulance trip can vary widely from town to town."
When it comes to helicopter life flights, it's even worse. It has been calculated that the average life flight costs around $11,000. Yet they can and do charge anything they like, and 50-60K is the norm. Why? Because they can. Unregulated.
@RoryAlsop We just had a bill passed that we may be able to buy our drugs from Canada. The notion that tat is even necessary is appalling.
