We need healthcare reform, and not healthcare financing reform which is just a shell game where you move the pea around so much that everyone loses track of it and thinks that the care is free.

We need to move away from the “doctor with a black bag” model of healthcare and use technology to provide care to people. This will increase the quality of care as well as lowering its costs. In the future, your primary care physician will be a computer, and possibly paid for by ads. It might even be built into your refrigerator (many health problems start there!)

Of course the lock the AMA has on the industry and all the laws about “practicing medicine without a license” keep software and hardware designers cowering in the corner rather than innovating.

I can remember when I was a kid in the early 1960's. You had "major medical" which covered 80% of really catastrophic issues. Other than that, you did pay cash at the local doctor, and there was lots of competition among doctors. The one we went to worked out of a section of his house right in the neighborhood. No one complained about the cost of health care. I can fully believe that the government has messed things up and now threatens to take over more and more until its all socialized medicine. Obamacare was a gift to the insurance companies, who now charge far more for insurance than they did last year, with some of the increased costs being paid for by deficit spending. It was cronyism at its best. Now I need to join MDVIP.com and pay and additional $1500 a year to even get access to a good local doctor without waiting weeks for an appointment. Obama is an idiot for sure.

Supply of doctors is merely one factor. Have you noticed the consolidation of hospitals? The mega-quasi-public hospitals are spending billions buying up land, buildings, doctor's practices, etc. Hospital administrators are becoming millionaires in the process. Who do think is paying the tab?

Thank for re-posting. Very interesting. I kept thinking, this is why I'm never going to be a Democrat.

Both very interesting articles, even the one from Waldman at CNN blaming the conservatives view. I'm on two inhalers these days thanks to Vietnam. One costs $74 and the other $294 for a 30 day supply. And thanks to Vietnam my copays are $8 each.

This government solution to healthcare seems very similar to the government intervention in education, and many other factors and businesses we deal with. We've got to make up minds soon which way we want this country to go or the government will just decide for us. It's that simple. I vote to start shutting down government departments that are not doing what they claim they were intended to do.

State licensing and the FDA have got to go. Any willing patient and any willing provider for a mutually agreed to treatment for a mutually agreed to price.

Excellent article. I wasn't around in September, so I'm glad you reposted. Couple all this with runaway inflation so that the middle class no longer has disposable income and is dependent on insurance and government for health care. A perfect recipe for control!

I can only liken our trip away from the health care of pre 1965 to today's mess as being on a nice paved highway only to be talked into a side road that becomes unpaved and muddy. Having lived through the era when tonsils were taken out in the doctor's office, to today when a cut finger requires a release form, I can attest that the article is true. I doubt if any health care reform, given the state it's in today can really do what's needed. Too many moochers, too far gone.

That quote from AMA inaugural meeting, to limit the supply of doctors, is an absolute gem!
Thanks for posting again, I missed it the first time.

Hello freedomforall,
Thank's for re-posting. It is an excellent article.
Too bad our politicians are generally so ill informed on economics and history.
Regards,
O.A.

What we need most are three major reforms: a "loser-pays" tort system (to reduce costs), deregulation of medicine, especially drugs (also to reduce costs), and separation of medicine from both employment and the tax code (so people will pay more directly for their own care, and thus have to confront its actual costs).

I remember the Senatorial election in Nevada in 1992. That was the first time Harry Reid was up for election after I had moved to Nevada. His opponent was Republican Demar Dahl. Part of Demar's plank was to completely open up the healthcare industry to the free market. Demar lost against the machine Harry had well in place by then.

Here we are 23 years later and in the ever worsening mess that is the healthcare "system". And Harry finally announces he is retiring. Thanks Harry, ever so much for being a perpetual embarrassment to the State of Nevada.

Wow. AWESOME article! +10,000 if I could!

I would be willing to bet that prices would fall if the AMA didn't limit the number of graduates from medical school and we all quit carrying insurance. I use to work for the DOI in a consumer service office. Every state has one. The state Commissioners and insurance executives were cozy and the deals were struck between them. Insurance companies will do well under Obamacare. I just think things are too far gone to change them.

The thing the article (and especially the graph) fails to take into account is the 'tools of the trade'. Before 1947, what a doctor was capable of doing had not changed much over the millennia. Antibiotics and X-rays changed all that - doctors became miracle men.

Other than that, I agree with the article notably in reference to the artificial structure of the pyramid of power by which doctors act as gatekeepers to medical care that can effectively be implemented at a lower level of expertise.

And I am totally in synch with the need for 'free market' medical coverage. Let's just make my medical insurance belong to 'me'...the way my car insurance does.

Jan

How in the world can you attribute blame for high health care costs without including judges and lawyers?

The USA's medical costs make it a hilarious laughing stock around the world, a testament not only to the corruption of the profession, but also the unbelievable tolerance of American citizens in what is supposed to be a democracy.

India and China are chock-full of doctor-mill universities, churning them out in the tens of thousands. Their upper-band graduates actually have a great foundation to becoming really good practitioners. While the US is building more medical schools, there would be merit in opening the immigration floodgates to some of these fresh graduates and helping to rectify the artificially-depressed supply.