The big problem with medicine is its cost, and a big part of its costs stem from the fact that medicine has become a government-cosseted cartel and racket, engaging in price fixing and exclusion of competition. From Karl Denninger at theburningplatform.com:
If you want to know why fixing “health care” is so difficult you need only read this article.
From Akron to Youngstown and Canton to Cleveland, as in cities and towns across the country, workers who once walked out of factories at the end of each shift now stream out of hospitals.
While manufacturing employment has fallen nearly 40 percent in northeastern Ohio since 2000, the number of health care jobs in the region has jumped more than 30 percent over the same period. In Akron, the onetime rubber capital of the world, only one of the city’s 10 largest employers still makes tires. Three are hospitals.
If these were doctors and nurses that might be understandable. But they’re not.
They’re nearly all paper-pushers who contribute exactly zero to actual consumer care.
The problem is that all of these people draw salaries and thus drive up the cost of medical care by ridiculous amounts. In fact last month some 20,000 people were added to the “health care” employment rolls and nearly all of them will never provide one second of actual care to an actual person — but every one of them has and will massively drive up your health care costs. In fact if the average “administrator” in that group makes $40,000 in the last month alone a whopping $800 million per year before their health insurance and employment tax cost was added to your medical bills and yet not one single person got one minute of additional actual care out of that expense.
Next month there will be another $800 million added on which you will be forced to pay.
The next, and at least as-large problem is found in the continual bleating of hospitals and similar that “Medicare doesn’t pay what X costs” as their justification to gouge private parties. But this claim is false; if you look at many of the so-called “non-profits” you can find myriad examples of this being a flat-out lie, and nowhere is it easier to find than in the hospitals’ lab sections.
Direct operating costs are usually about 10% of the revenue amounts!
To continue reading: The True Face Of ‘Health Reform’
