BBC NEWS | Health | Doctors ‘deny elderly treatments’
News Type: Event — Seeded on Thu Feb 15, 2007 5:18 AM EST
Read ArticleArticle Source: BBC News
health, money, health-care, libertarians, socialized-medicine
Seeded by reinkefj
Doctors deny older people treatments they would offer younger patients, according to a study.
In the “health care” debate, with the socialists in both major parties advocating mandatory insurance, “single payer”, and all sorts of gooferment involvement, we need to keep focusing on the “working laboratories” of results reported from Canada and England. Personally, I think we started down a dangerous path to socialism when “benefits”, medical insurance, and Medicare / Medicaid were introduced. Maybe I’ll blog about the details (http://www.reinkefaceslife.com), but when you remove the dynamic of the “individual paying for their own healthcare” then all sorts of bad “unintended consequences” sneak in. Here’s one of them socialized medicine kills old people. Not necessarily unproductive old people, not demented suffering old people, and not necessarily those at the end of their lives. If fact, the way I read the article, it’s all about hustling the old of life.
Thu Feb 15, 2007 5:25 AM EST
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England and Canada offer us a “laboratory” on socialized medicine. Not that I think the USA system is great. I’m just not sure that what the politicians propose is any better. In fact, if I know gooferment, it will make it worse. The “laboratories” are useful in the debate because we can see the impact of socialized medicine on people over there and extended it to what will happen here. Our politicians are no better than theirs. Our doctors are no less or no more than theirs. Socialized medicine sets up perverse incentives. And, we need to the “laboratory” lessons to heart. There’s a reason that Canadians come to the USA for MRIs. There’s a reason that elderly English dialysis patients migrate to other countries. There’s a reason why Californians are getting hips replaced in India. And, we have to hold our politicians accountable for those answers BEFORE we let them do anything.
The wage price controls of WW2 started the current “benefits” fiasco. Business seeking to retain their good people, faced with a wage cap, came up with paid medical insurance as a way around the limitation. From whence, we got wage slaves who had to keep their job to keep their benefits. Having purchased medical insurance on my own as a consultant, it not cheap but not impossible. We need to take it out of the company’s benefit package and put it back in people’s hands. At the very least, if I buy medical insurance it should be tax deductible to me. We need to jigger the scales. Remove the business from the “benefits” business by removing the tax deductibility. Let people be in total control of their own money.
Where stuff gets tricky is when it ceases to be catastrophic insurance and a prepayment plan for routine stuff. I like to use the car metaphor to understand it. Car insurance is for accidents; not oil changes or fender benders. Why send money to a third party, with all the shipping and handling, to pay for routine or small stuff. What’s next insurance for gasoline consumption. No medical care is more like the car than anything else. Medical Savings Accounts with high deductible catastrophic coverage is the way to go. Change people’s economic behavior and you’ll solve the problem.
Medicare / Medicaid and all gooferment regulation of medicine must end. Period. It has totally screwed up the marketplace.
Argh!
(ain’t insomnia productive?)
Reinke Faces Life 