Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by candiodari 3171 days ago
Have you seen healthcare regulations ? The lengths hospitals and drug makers have to go through to prevent ANY mistakes are simply not reasonable.

That's not 1/1000. Not 1/1000000. Not 1/1000000000. Zero. Entire companies get shut down because of a single mistake. Think about how ridiculous that is. A company owns 5 separate factories, and in one of them a product was produced that may, in a panel of doctor's opinions, have caused the death of a patient (mostly one who would have died without the medicine), and all 5 are immediately shut down until an extensive investigation is not just run, but run in an approved manner by outside experts, and the resulting cause was both found, approved by the panel of doctors and the government.

And of course, a company is supposed to take care of any patient they damaged, for life, full treatment for all ailments (not just the one that had something to do with what they did), ...

We used to let people prepare medicines in corner shops with at least a few ingredients they procured themselves. Needless to say, pretty cheap. Mistakes were ... not common, but certainly more so than today.

Until we find a balance between care provided and acceptable risk there will be no reasonably priced healthcare. Until we stop giving health at any cost, and count on "management" mistakes to do cost saving (regulating that people get thrown out of hospital the day after open heart surgery unless there are complications. Well, if you want to survive, you bloody well hope your doctor finds some complication. Needless to say, proposals for making it same day are on the table. Good luck).

And of course, like good capitalists faced with demands like this, companies don't say "are you bloody insane ? This will bankrupt the entire country", they say "How secure do you want it to be ? Perhaps even a bit more ? I mean we can always do better. That'll be $xxx(xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx)".

1 comments

I 've seen a ton of healthcare regulations and apprently we're in agreement they leave a lot to be desired.