Yes - I mean like you can own your own practice, but an ownership stake in the provision of other medical services should be outlawed.
For example: if you owned an MRI facility you would have a conflict of interest in referring a patient or if you sold prescription drugs yourself you might over-prescribe.
This is one of my beefs with alt med types who sell products like vitamin to their patients.
In the medical practice we use (Gnyecology, Pediatrics and Internal Medicine - pretty much what we consider primary care) the income from the lab must be many times the income from the clinic. I was thinking, no wonder every time I we go there I end up with a five minute consultation (plus ten minutes of the nurse checking height weight and blood pressure) and four or five labs. My new insurer provides an itemized statement of what was billed and what was paid, and even after the 50-70% haircut that they give to the charges, the labs are staggeringly expensive. They will pay $90 for the consult and $200 for the labs, after being billed $130 for the consult and $500 for the lab or something like that.
All three of us (me, wife and sprout) go there, and we love the doctors, but after seeing the itemized bills we are starting to wonder if we are having our blood drawn for our benefit or theirs.
We just got a statment showing a billing for over $2,000 for some allergy testing. The whole process took about ten minutes, eight minutes for the nurse and two minutes for the doctor. But each scratch and rub was billed out at $250!
And of course to make sure that the doctor didn’t spend more than a couple of minutes with us, we spent more than two hours at the doctors office, 75% of that just waiting to be seen first by the nurse and then by the doctor, then by the nurse again, and then by the doctor. There was a 30 minute wait that was required for the allergy test to “ripen” but the rest was I am sure to ensure that the “utlization rate” for them is as high as possible.
Your cite seems to state that malpractice *lawsuits *account for roughly the same proportion, but malpractice *insurance *(which is also paid for out of fees) is far higher in the U.S.
I also tend to believe that fear of lawsuits drives a certain amount of unnecessary procedures in the U.S. I don’t know how that could possibly be studied, however.
Question: If doctors are truly performing “unnecessary” tests, how does the failure to give such a test suggest that the doctor has not provided the appropriate “standard of care” necessary to find liability for malpractice.
Question: As a multiple of the doctor’s revenue, not net income, does anyone have any statistics on the relative costs of malpractice insurance in US, Canada, UK, etc…
Get rid of punitive damages. Period. If it is so bad that it needs to be “punished” then it should be a criminal offense.
If it turns out that the institution transplanted organs from a donor with non-matching blood types, is that criminal? Who should go to jail, and for how long, in a situation like that?
Let’s iron out the details if we’re going to legislate away something that has never really been much of a problem.
Of course, punishing something as a criminal offense does nothing for the injured party - sometimes acting like a total a-hole is worth a little more cake to the injury sufferer.
But this has nothing to do with med-mal as there are (almost) no punitive damage awards in cases of professional malpractice.
Any update on this? Do I gotta knock someone up for healthcare under this plan? If I couldn’t afford it on my own I wouldn’t be in a good place in life to have kids yet anyway.
By family, I meant “household”, so yes you would get a voucher in place of federal insurance if you wanted.
I don’t like the voucher part and I don’t like the binding arbitration part. The rest is okay.
I don’t care for vouchers. It’s just a way for people with agendas to have the government finance their idiotic way. I don’t want the government paying for “creation science” teaching and I don’t want the government paying for voodoo health or economics.
As for binding arbitration, the problem with binding arbitration is that the arbitrators are all in the pocket of the big companies. You take public decisions on damages from a panel of members of the public (juries) and put it into the hands of professional arbitrators, who require repeat business from big companies. Corporations have far more resources to pay off the arbitrators with repeat business than someone only injured once in a lifetime. The reason binding arbitration sucks for someone who only needs it once is that they are before an arbitrator who gets paid in the future based on decisions today. Juries (and judges) get cases coming to them whether they want them or not. (And they don’t want them!)