Making the patient worse

Many DOCTORS support health care reform, because the insurance companies have increasingly encroached upon their professional turf, making treatment decisions based upon cost, with no regard for the patient. Obama's current plan does not call for a government takeover of the health care sector--what you folks like to call "socialism". It works with the existing system to expand coverage to more people, especially children. Only a Repug could find fault with that.

The "doctor shortage" and "health care shortage" didn't exist before the government started helping the "needy". Every time the government tries to "help", the cost of the service in question increases exponentially. What started as a vote buying scam has turned into a national problem with no apparent fix...except to have the government step up the efforts that precipitated the problem to begin with. Funny stuff. The wonderful, though failed, socialized medicine of Europe and Canada is the only end result of all of this help. FROM THE CRADLE TO THE GRAVE. Will we ever have the right to not have all of these rights foisted off on us?

Bubba RA, you've obviously never left the plantation mentality and still want the massa to take care of you. Do you have even a cell in your brain?

Question,could the reason for no doctor shortage earlier be caused by less people going to the doctor? What was the life span back in the good old days? Where did the no doctor shortage info come from? Why have nurses always been in short supply?

PT: I guess you'll turn down medicare when you get old enough. After all, it's your right to pay for all medical expenses out of your pocket. The US ranks 45th in the world for life expectancy,yet spends more on health care per percent of GDP than any other industrialized nation (and they have universal health care). We need to reform our entire system. The drug companies overcharge US citizens compared to other countries. We allow them to bribe doctors with vacations and "seminars". The insurance companies limit the doctor you choose and you often have to fight them to receive treatment.The average employee contribution to company-provided health insurance has increased more than 143 percent since 2000. Average out-of-pocket costs for deductibles, co-payments for medications, and co-insurance for physician and hospital visits rose 115 percent during the same period. The doctor shortage exists due to the shortage of medical schools and the high cost of those schools. There's also a major nurses shortage. Since we don't face the high malpractice payments and Medicare underpayments that is obviously not the reason. And no PT has no compassion for anyone. she shows that consistently.

Move ahead with single payer universal health insurance. One reason for the doctor shortage is because powerful physician groups like the Medical Association of Georgia (MAG) opposed increasing the number of medical students 40 years ago. They did this to protect the income that physicians make. Georgia is one of if not THE last state to give prescriptive authority to physicians assistants & nurse practitioners. We need more generalists & fewer specialists. Access to health care providers is the name of the game when it comes to prevention. Physicians know little about nutrition & are not "reimbursed" (their code word) for educating patients. Teaching patients falls upon nurses who lack any real autonomy in their practice. Nurses are still handmaidens to doctors & doctors are beholden to insurance companies & pharmaceutical firms. Actually, the entire medical delivery system is broken & needs to be restructured from top to bottom. Meanwhile more than 43 million Americans do without any health insurance whatsoever & that number is growing. Heath insurance is a big factor in the fiscal crises faced by the Big 3 automakers. Basic universal heath insurances will benefit all Americans.

TechLover, I don't disagree with a bit of the intelligent part of your 8:45 post. (about half of it) Yes, we do need to reform the medical business. We need to get government out of the distribution part. The laws about drug companies bribing doctors need to be enforced. The government regulations forcing insurance companies to run their medical business according to government standards needs to be dealt with. The government needs to get out of the distribution business. Guidelines need to be set to prevent as much quackery as possible. The shortage of nurses is a result of a lack of promotion toward the job and the job description. Not everyone is cut out to be a nurse. And finally TechLover, being practical is not the same as lacking compassion. Just like being a fluffy headed lefty doesn't mean you're more compassionate.

Cain, most of your post makes sense and addresses a lot of the root problems with the medical business. Nutrition education should be taught early in government schools and included in primary education until high school graduation. Personal health care and preventative methods should be included. A lot of the overload on the medical business could be avoided. The duties of nurses need to be focused on medical care and not education, just as the doctors should. The fiscal problems with the Big 3 include distribution of "benefits" they agreed to give to the unions. They should have to make good on their foolish contracts or reorganize under bankruptcy laws. While universal health insurance would benefit all Americans, the distribution of the benefit remains the sticking point. So far, the efforts of the federal government to administer programs of this size have been suspect at best.

Whatever "system" they decide on will HAVE to be better than England or Canada. In Canada you wait 6 months for a MRI and to get intot a maternity ward takes 10 months. See any problem with that? Canadians regularly come to the states for healthcare because their system doesn't work. For that matter if people anywhere in the world need good care they come to the United States. Take the insurance company profits out of the loop and I bet things would be better for the Doctors and the Patients.

Actually, the nursing shortage didn't begin until 1983, when doctors were being targets of attacks from domestic terrorists.

Doctors are leaving the profession? Funny I don't recall anyone that was a former doctor and is now a plumber , electrician, or carpenter. Get real and quit trying to blame it on insurance. I wasn't born yesterday and I know if doctors charge thousands for a procedure, then an insurance company has to charge a certain amount to cover that doctors cost. I recently went to have a procedure tested and was charged about 4,000 dollars a night for the test. They used the same equipment in the same room and the same (probably 18.00 an hour) nurse that they have been using for years for thousands of patients. So where was the cost? I'll tell you it wasn't my insurance and it wasn't the nurse, I believe you can figure out what costs the money, and remember they are self-regulating which means no oversight except by themselves. I say if we are so critically short of doctors, then let more from India and Pakistan come in. I didn't include doctors from Europe because they like their social medicine programs and don't really want to come here.

The doctors don't complain in Europe because their lives have been socialized. If you live in a society and are taught their mantra from birth to grave it is all you know and you believe in it. Hey, I've got an idea, why don't you move to Europe and become one of them, disssman? The Hospital charged you $4000 a night, not the doctor and if I spend 13 years or more years of my life in school I want to be paid for it.

I went to school for 12 years, paid over close to $200,000 to do it, had my first real job in my 30's. I finally get a job that pays more than a McDonald's job and have weekends off, and 40% of my salary goes to taxes. Then insurance companies tell me what I can get paid, and what I can use to treat my patients. Problems with insurance coverage? I pay my staff to argue with them. Do I make more because I feel that treatment is the best? NO. Sometimes I feel like we should tell the patient what we feel is the best treatment and let them fight -insurance companies don't care what I think. As for drug companies,no physician gets more than some cheap China made pens that we could care less about, or some sticky notes that we use to send messages to staff related to patient care. People think drug companies are going to pour money into research if they can not make anything when they actually get a product? How about lawyer/accountant/business people who take clients out to dinner? You think we all don't pay for that?
Do congressmen need all of those expensive trips to gather info? We pay for that too. It should all stop.

TechLover, stop taking Medicare Tax out of my check RIGHT NOW, and return what I've paid in over the last 25 years, and I will forgo any claim I have on Medicare. Same goes for Social Security. Deal? Hell no, it's not a deal, because you know that I, as a productive citizen, put more into Medicare and SS and all the other "entitlements" than I will ever get out of them. The only way to make it look like that isn't the case is to fudge the books and steal the money from my grandchildren. Problem is, what if my grandchildren agree with you, and RetiredArmy, and Williston, and (I'm sure) Cain, and just decide that they are "entitled," too? Ask them in Sweden, in Denmark...what happens when growing numbers of your population decide that the govt-provided baseline is better than working for a living? Hell, I was raised right, so you know I'll be a workhorse until I'm dead, but at least one of my children has already decided that he can take it a lot easier than that...what if all four decide to consume more than they produce? Where will you get the $ to pay for all your "compassion"? Compassion is when I willingly give to another. Govt coercion and theft is not compassion, it's fascism

The system is not perfect, but do you suggest it would be better to allow the poor to die because they cannot afford healthcare? What we need to do is get the consumer in charge of their healthcare, we need clear, up front pricing, so that everyone knows what they are paying for up front. The problem with the healthcare industry is that it does not behave according to free market principles, costs are hidden and most consumers have little or no choice of where to get care.

HillGuy, anybody too destitute to get insurance can walk into an ER and get treated. Want my solution? Free clinics. If you can get your crap together enough to have cable TV, a cellphone and car, but you can't see why you ought to buy health insurance, then stop clogging up the ER and go sit in a free clinic until the doc gets to you. Either that, or hit the doc-in-a-box over at WalMart.

There was a study at one of the prestigious business schools that found that the number of people who truly fell through the cracks in our health care system as far as having insurance was only about 10 million. 10 million didn't have it because they chose not to buy it, even though they could afford it. 10 million plus were here illegally. And 10 million were eligible for existing programs, but were not signed up. We have to spend a lot of money out of pocket before our insurance kicks in. We carefully weigh our options as far as treatments go.

galax:The only place I can find the statistics you mention are in right wing blogs and they all talk about it in the same way.Perchance are they all repeating info they got off the internet from each other? Real info:In a 2005 survey, half of the 2.1 million adults who had a non‑emergency MRI, CT or angiography in the past year reported waiting three weeks or less. Ninety percent reported that their tests took place within four months. Emergencies there are handled immediately, just as in the US.The only complaints I found on maternity care was that many had to travel long distances to the hospital. Due to the vastness of Canada and the remoteness of some villages and towns, this is understandable.This also comes in to play with wait times for all services. I live in the good old US and had to wait 5 weeks for an appointment with a neurosugeon to fix a pinched nerve in my neck. Even with insurance, I still had to pay a big chunk of cash for the procedure. We need to do something to improve the process here. If you read my above post you will see that the US is 45th in life expectancy,Canada 14,UK 37. The only western European countries below us are Denmark 47 and Ireland 48.

Tech, do those life expectancy figures include murders and traffic accidents?

Does this life expectancy include self induced illnesses? ...bad eating habits, bad exercise habits, drug habits? Our country is spoiled and wealthy compared to most of the rest of the world. Many voters feel we shouldn't be responsible for our own behavior and that the government should take care of us from the cradle to the grave. They should lose the qualification to vote if they're on the dole.

Retired Army, bringing up race when the subject is goverment run health care is your usual inability to grasp the subject at hand. As for those who lived on the plantations, the got medical care, even the slaves. Agter all, slaves were valuabel property and sure weren't neglected as such.

Willietown, you are indeed a nincompoop. The attack against abortionists had nothing to do with the nursing shortage. Very few of the total population of nurses are in the abortion business. A primary reason for the nursing shortage is low pay and long hours, especially in hospitals. This is also the reason a lot of your in hospial care is now done by LPNs (Nursing assistants or whatever they choose to call them) who are paid even lower and require even less training than nurses (and your health care suffers). However, the cost of your in hospital care keeps rising. Socialized medicine is NOT the answer, however. I believe the free market system is best and has been proven so. Anyone needing emergecny care can go to any ER and get it. Ask any illegal alien if they have been turned awasy (though havng a baby ain't exactly an emergency).

PT: The nursing shortage is due to not enough nursing educators. If you were informed on the subject you would know that.

ksl: Since it's estimated that 47 million in the US don't have insurance, your numbers don't add up.

The nursing shortage may be partially due to the lack of educators but there are other reasons. For the work, the pay is too low. You have to work nights,weekends, and holidays. You're exposed to every kind of pathogen known to man. You have avery limited number of sick days, even if you've caught something at work.The job is both physically and mentally demanding. Try rolling a 700 pound person when they've defecated on themselves. You're understaffed. If a mistake is made, whether it's the MD's error or the pharmacy's error, it's your fault. Experienced nurses are leaving or retiring so you're having to work with a bunch of inexperienced colleages. Nursing boards have become a joke, it used to be a 2 full day test, now it's on computer and you can get by with answering as few as 75 questions. I have seen the difference in new nurses since the change. It's a tough job and not everyone is cut out for it.

The 47 estimate is more recent than the study. Probably due to more illegal immigrants. At the time of the study the numbers did add up to around the estimated 40 million. Now I don't feel illegal immigrants should be here, let alone be covered by our tax dollars. Also, pay attention to the fact that when Hawaii started universal coverage for children, lots of parents dropped the insurance they had been paying for. Hawaii's plan lasted about 8 months before the had to discontinue due to the cost.

In a country this big, providing health care for its citizenry should be a given.

Why grouse? Health care should be just like other insurances, clothing, shelter, food, transportation. Why is it a government responsibility? What sets it apart from homeowners or auto or life insurance?

Doctors pay: Low ball estimate: An ER doc sees about 30 patients a day works 260 days a year for a total of about 8000 pts a year. ER docs make an average of $250,000 a year before taxes. That is $30 dollars per patient...doesnt sound like a lot now does it.QUIT complaning about doctors pay. General practice docs make far less.