| This entire line of argument distracts from the real issues and makes progress harder to achieve. Physician salaries are one of the worst possible places to start addressing this issue. US doctors apparently earn about 2x the average for other comparable nations. That's not a small number, but doctor's salaries in toto are only about 8% of US healthcare spending. A 50% reduction would bring our salary spending in line with everyone else, but only save $100 billion out of a $3,300 billion cost. Meanwhile, outright waste in medical supply spending costs $765 billion per year. That's drugs discarded at expiration dates which are known to be too restrictive, spending on combination drugs which are identical to the sum of cheaper components, and supplies thrown away by hospitals for non-sanitary reasons (e.g. vendor change, or drugs allotted for a patient but never issued or opened). Changing some parts of this would involve challenging the profits of drug companies, but in many cases not even that would be required. A handful of regulatory changes could save enough to offset the entire cost of paying doctors. The situation with unnecessary or ineffective medical treatments is comparable. Some of the most common surgeries performed are known not to work, suspected not to work, or known to be more risky than inaction for standard patients, but they're still carried out at enormous expense. Adjustments to medical publication standards, physician statistical training, and and malpractice risk profiles could massively reduce the number of unnecessary and even net-harmful surgical procedures performed every year, cutting costs while directly improving care. Framing medical expenses as a conflict between consumer expenses and doctor's salaries is false and harmful. It literally can't solve the problem, but it's excellent at derailing the work that could. https://www.propublica.org/article/the-myth-of-drug-expirati... https://www.propublica.org/article/what-hospitals-waste https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/02/when-evid... |
Should patients be consigned to disability immediately without even attempting some procedure, simply because the chance of success is too small in your arbitrary definition?
You have never been seriously sick.