[killjoywashere]

Thank the hero of Medicare, Lyndon Johnson. When CMS actually needed to start pricing things, he directed them to his old buddy, the famous heart surgeon, Michael DeBakey. DeBakey sent a couple fellows of his to DC to write up the price list for CMS. Shockingly, surgical procedures got a lot of money and office visits got approximately nothing. This has propogated for 60 years now with increasing precision as the rate of inflation gets applied over and over. A WAG of "10,000 for bypass" is now "57,348.32 +/- 343.43" but the error represents the uncertainty in inflation over time, not any better resolution on the cost of the procedure.

[freddie_mercury]

Why are you so quick to assign blame to the first actors? This expectation that the first people to do something need to make it perfect in every way is completely toxic and one reason for the total paralysis of America.

The majority of the blame here lies with the thousands of politicians, bureaucrats, and administrators who haven't reformed the system in *sixty years*. Not the people who were doing their best with much less information than their successors have had.

[brewdad]

I can only hope you feel the same way about a 2nd Amendment written when a single fire musket that took 10-30 seconds to reload was the peak of "arms". 5th Amendment "Papers" could use a bit of rethinking too.

There are a lot of first actions that need to be reexamined in the 21st century.