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Adam Smith, who is considered to be quite the capitalist, said that it is impossible to have a free market if the participants cannot choose not to participate.
Letting Doctors use the “free market” set medical prices is not only sinful, it is not justifiable by the most originalist economic theory.
Blaming doctors for insurance, pharmaceutical, and healthcare companies prices is a bit rich.
Letting capitalists into healthcare is the issue, not the fucking doctors. Shit the doctors are probably just as indebted to their student loans as their patients are to the hospitals, while getting reamed with fucked 24/36 hour shifts and overworked to the bone.
People don't seem to understand that the entire medical profession is structured around exploitation — where they still expect you to work 80+ hour weeks back to back, often with shifts that last 18+ hours, and a few hours sleep in between.
Lumping the medical scientists/professionals with medical capitalists is class warfare.
My primary care doctor of 20+ years just quit the practice. He confided in me that it just wasn't worth it for him to keep dealing with the crazy demands and dwindling rewards. He is one of about 150k doctors who left the profession in the last couple years.
The ACA was supposed to have a public option that would put a control on the insurance prices. Ideally the public option would be so good that the insurance industry would just wither and die.
But the health insurance industry, mainly via Joe Lieberman, made sure that was never going to happen.
Universal healthcare > cheap ACA insurance
Don’t settle for less.
Don't settle, but at least accept while still demanding more.
Nothing is served by wallowing in failure by only accepting non-existent perfection.
Momentum matters.
Accepting a bone here and there stops many from being hungry enough to demand more. It’s the whole reason Bismarck invented State Socialism to stop the growing threat of leftist ideas.
It was meant to be the first step in a progression that would have led to universal healthcare. Unfortunately, America figured out how to maim it and halt progress. In fact, America figured out how to regress in so many ways, not just in the arena of healthcare.
Only America can fail as hard and fast as America once succeeded.
Don't forget Joe Lieberman is one of the founders of the No Labels party.
https://www.nolabels.org/meettheteam
If you want to know who NOT to trust, check the link
The website looks like all Sunshine and rainbows. Now I'm really curious why they can't be trusted.
Jmho. As a political party you need a platform, as far as I can tell No Labels platform is "can't we all just get along?"
Also their members make up a who's who of keeping actual legislation from happening, starting with Joe Lieberman for removing a single pair option from the ACA. Rumor has it they have courted Kristen Simena and Joe's manchin.
Also Harland Crowe is rumored to be a big funder, as far as I'm concerned these people represent money and nothing else.
Unfortunately Capitalism by its very nature abhors a free market. Free markets mean more competition, which means less profits. Which is counter to the ideology of capitalism, that being higher profits mean success.
You do everything right and still lose it all - our capitalistic system is working exactly the way it is intended.
If only either political party in America agreed...
We're stuck with only a small slice of Dems that even acknowledge our system is fucked.
We're stuck with only a small slice of Dems that even acknowledge our system is fucked.
Which explains why Bernie Sanders got sacked in their presidential primaries, twice.
That was vague, my bad.
I ~~might~~ meant a small slice of dem politicians.
Voters of the Dem party and independents largely support healthcare reform, and even a good amount of Republicans.
But the party keeps supporting incumbents who don't represent their voters.
Just a bunch of old politicians deciding it's best for all of them to stay in power because they know better than voters.
That was vague, my bad.
I [meant] a small slice of dem politicians.
Oh, that was understood.
And what I meant was that the party itself orchestrated his sacking.
And you keep going with them or whomever is fighting for the people.
Vote with your heart in the primary, and your brain in the general.
Which is why it sucks so much we don't get primaries every election.
People are literally dying from inaction in America, and we really don't have any say it.
I hate the US healthcare system so much. So much stress for so many people for so little reason.
There's a reason why literally no developed country in the world is imitating that system. It's broken and it doesn't work for most people.
I am tired of this. Is anyone actually working on solutions or are we just going to complain?
What would it take to setup a low cost health care clinic and hospital that is covering it's marginal costs?
There is a current movement called Direct Primary Care, where you sign up to a binding agreement to pay a continuing monthly subscription fee that covers your office visits, and your labs and prescriptions are also discounted. So it's possible. And it sounds absolutely fantastic upfront.
But the problem there is that places that do not accept insurance and/or Medicaid and Medicare are also not governed by HIPAA and other state and federal healthcare laws, something most people don't even know until they find out the hard way. I have a relative who thought DPC was the best thing since sliced bread until she found out that all the strange tests she kept being told she needed were not actually for her, and she was actually being submitted to various clinical trials without her knowledge and against her directly expressed wishes, for symptoms and diseases she's never even had.
So now she's paying for a monthly DPC subscription she can't use because she's afraid of them and refuses to go back. They won't even give her her medical records (not surprising, because that practice is all a clinical trial fraud scam so they'd be a work of fiction anyway). And she doesn't have a lot of money to start with; she can go to an urgent care place if she needs something immediate, I suppose.
But if you break a DPC agreement, you have to pay full value for every office visit you ever had, every non-billable service under the agreement, and it gets added up against the monthly subscription fees you've been paying. These agreements are written so as to be difficult to break (pick one and look for the following "Termination" language):
If this agreement is terminated or held to be invalid or unenforceable for any reason, you agree to pay practice an amount equal to the fair market value of the services actually rendered to you during the period of time for which the fees were paid commensurate with prevailing rates in the practice area . . .
So yeah, DPC is great in theory, as long as in practice it's not just a front end for some other medical scam, because they lack oversight and are exempt from all the consumer protections built into insurance-oriented laws like HIPAA. There is no recourse with these non-insurance places, because insurance laws are also pretty much the only consumer protection laws with teeth that exist in the doctor-patient relationship, and very few states have any legislative experience with, much less written law, in regard to Direct Primary Care. We're trying to find an attorney that knows enough about it to be able to assist, but even that's a challenge.
I don't know if fraud was the primary intention of Direct Primary Care, but because of the way it is structured it absolutely attracts the bottom feeders of medical practice who want to pull in otherwise underserved (uninsured, poor, undocumented) patients for some kind of economic exploitation.
That story is pretty horrific.
Yeah, and it's still ongoing. She can leave and get hit with an as-yet-unknown fee/bill, or she can stay and not have her own needs addressed but be pressured into carrying on underwriting her own clinical trial eligibility tests.
She's terrified of setting foot in there now because when she started to argue she'd never had [whatever] and didn't need these tests they got really aggressive. Not physical, just verbally hard hitting, like abruptly changing the subject and then coming back around to it two minutes later to insist she needs this, and doing that over and over again, ignoring or twisting anything she tried to say in reply, and this was at the end of a day long fast for blood tests. There's more, just petty shit like you'd expect from a high-pressure con, but that's the kind of thing.
Fortunately the tests she was objecting to were not common, and she has an in-law who is retired from medicine, so when she asked him what was going on and named the tests they wanted he was able to cotton on pretty quickly and at least tell her it had nothing to do with her or her own needs.
But the only red flag up front was that they have ZERO local reviews. None. They have pay-to-play awards like "best in town" in a local newspaper, and NOTHING else anywhere. That was odd. Now we know why.
I don't see how this ends well. She'll either pay some fat bill or end up in court, none of which has anything to do with the healthcare she signed up for. I wrote all this so that maybe someone thinking about DPC will think twice before they sign up.
Thank you for sharing this story. Things can only change is the abuses are shared with many people.
I am sorry she is going through this.
Thank you. I don't mind saying it's scary as hell.
That really sounds like some dystopian science fiction novel. But I guess that's true for a lot of things going on in the US right now.
That really sounds like some dystopian science fiction novel.
Funny you should say that. When she first told me what was going on, my mind immediately went back to that Robin Cook novel Coma from the 70s, lol.
Probably a justice system where you can't be sued for 150 bajilion for every time someone slips on wet floor. And where health insurance does not expect you to give them 95% discount because every other hospital does. Among other things.
I don't know. How would you get around malpractice insurance and deal with the competition that has economy of scale?
It's finally working!!! We're nearly fully incorporated in the profit-machine! I hope the billionaires notice me for a moment so that I can feel like I'm one of them
He looked at me! WITNESS ME!!!
As intended. We are a capitalism. As long as we are, capital shall be God. As long as They who have the most money shall prevail, they who have the most money will prevail.
Capitalism is OK as long as it is regulated. The free market is nearly a myth because of Billionaires.
Here I am. Sitting in a private room with my son at one of the best children's hospitals in the world. 5 therapy sessions a day. And all I have to worry about is food for me and the wife. I used to bug my dad about moving to Canada. Now I thank him.