Originally Posted by DocRay
As long as medicine is for-profit, corporate interests will take precedence over people every day.
Don't blame the guys doing the work, blame the guys you can't see, the consultants and MBAs who maximize profits and minimize care. We had a crew of these guys at Duke making $780K-$1.8M a year, they had created a health plan so overpriced that Duke Medical Centre employees were not even covered, they had to go to UNC Medical. But DUMC had a neat $12M monorail (I'm not kidding).
Hard to imagine any health care centre is really trying to minimize costs when they spend $30,000-$50,000 for every 30 second ad on TV. Guess who pays for that?
Why do we put up with this sh1t? We spend more per year per person than any other industrialized nation ($6000 I think) and don't see as much in terms of health outcomes. How are we going to fix some of these systematic problems w/out nationalizing healthcare? This might sound wacky to you guys but I'd rather pay for one bloated gov't bureaucracy than a blizzard of redundant corporate bureaucracies.