Couple of quick thoughts:
1. My sister lives in Calgary AB, Cananda. She has told me for a few years now about the terrible health care there. She has had crazy long wait times to see doctors about nearly routine problems with her children. Her biggest fear is with the emergency medical system. You see, there is a shortage of doctors and nurses (because they are underpaid - according to her nurse friend). Because of this shortage there is not enough staff, often times, to triage and admit new patients in the ER. To protect the patients, their is a rule that the ambulance crew must stay with the patient until admitted. This ties the ambulance and crew up, for hours at a time. All this leads to long wait times for emergency ambulance help.
Pull the thread on this problem and it's obvious that the lack of free market competition, and the ability to charge market rates for care, so as to pay for proper staffing is at the root (or close to it anyway).
2. After England went to the single payer system the number of patients treated dropped by 11%. However, the number of employees working in the system increased by nearly 50%. Most of these new employees being middle managers (bureaucrats).
3. All this talk about business being "too big to fail", is interesting. I think that we should look at any health care reforms in the same way. Let's not play with fire. Let's the states try different systems and ideas to see if a certain system works better than others. This is too costly an experiment to pretend to try on the entire nation at once. WAY to big to fail.
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Re: Non-Profit ??? Horrible Solution
Couple of quick thoughts:
1. My sister lives in Calgary AB, Cananda. She has told me for a few years now about the terrible health care there. She has had crazy long wait times to see doctors about nearly routine problems with her children. Her biggest fear is with the emergency medical system. You see, there is a shortage of doctors and nurses (because they are underpaid - according to her nurse friend). Because of this shortage there is not enough staff, often times, to triage and admit new patients in the ER. To protect the patients, their is a rule that the ambulance crew must stay with the patient until admitted. This ties the ambulance and crew up, for hours at a time. All this leads to long wait times for emergency ambulance help.
Pull the thread on this problem and it's obvious that the lack of free market competition, and the ability to charge market rates for care, so as to pay for proper staffing is at the root (or close to it anyway).
2. After England went to the single payer system the number of patients treated dropped by 11%. However, the number of employees working in the system increased by nearly 50%. Most of these new employees being middle managers (bureaucrats).
3. All this talk about business being "too big to fail", is interesting. I think that we should look at any health care reforms in the same way. Let's not play with fire. Let's the states try different systems and ideas to see if a certain system works better than others. This is too costly an experiment to pretend to try on the entire nation at once. WAY to big to fail.
Techdirt has not posted any stories submitted by acegilbert.
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