The medical industry only seems to know how to help people die slowly and expensively. I don't know the solution as long as the system is there and people are brainwashed into using it.

I think the best course is to eat properly (see my signature) and let nature take its course. That is a different mindset than what people are trained to have, but the best because when nature heals, it generally does a better job than the alternatives available through modern medicine.

And lest we forget: All men are mortal. No amount of resources - in essence the lives of others - poured into a single life will change that fact.

An oldie, but a goodie: http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?single....

I hate to discredit an entire profession, but physicians are worse than used car salesman. They know the value of a dollar and they're damned greedy. Their money is much more important than your health. As a 62 year old I dehydrated and died. They brought me back after an adventurous 2 hours of trying to figure out what happened until they found that I had no potassium. Then they knew it was simple dehydration. Everyone knew. The long and short of it is they ended up putting in a defibrilator at a cost of more than $100 thousand. I objected for weeks, but they insisted until I finally relented. That was three years ago. The only time it has come into play was when I exceeded the maximum heart rate allowable during exercise. It went off and shocked me three times. Not only did they screw the system and waste the money, they nearly killed me. Had I been cycling near a cliff ...

Robertt, that is classic! Give you a defibrilator for dehydration!

Notice how the doctor in the video stated at the end that some places have higher-quality/lower cost care in some places than in others, but didn't state why that is (or examples of where).
You would think that would be something to mention...unless it had to do with factors the left does not want brought up on MSNBC.

I wonder, what % of GDP will be consumed by this monstrosity of a health care system before people say, "enough!"?

Icanhasbailout, people won't be saying "enough" while half the people in the US are employed by the health-care system in some way or other. Certainly looks like about half the people I know with jobs that pay a middle-class income (or above) are employed in health care.

Gh--I think his book gives the answer. The best experts need to create the checklists and doctors need to use the checklists.

The bottom half of the medical school and nursing school classes can give very bad care which is very expensive.

I'm not computing what this guy says. I have seen bills in hospitals. I would venture the bottom 80% may average $500 a year max. Of course, I am leaving out the pills, which is the other half of the racket. Then again, outside of one trip to the hospital, I think I have taken 3 prescriptions in the past 20 years, a z-pack and maybe $100 on an anti-fungal drug I took 19 years ago. 17% of GDP is $2.5 trillion or roughly $8000 per capita. My bills over the last 20 years have been around $25,000 total. Maybe I am the lucky one, but I doubt most Americans have serious issues before age 55. One, maybe 2 years I was in that top 20%, if you count the ER scandal I have mentioned before here.

If my guestimate is close, then we are talking about $120 billion for 80% of the population and $2.4 trillion for the top 20%. If you go to my average for the past 20 years, $1250, we get to $300 billion. Throw in $500 dental and that adds another $150 billion (I don't know if dental counts or not, so lets count it, the average for the entire population). This gets us to $420 billion. This leaves 60 million people needing $2.1 billion in medical care. That is an average of $35,000 per capita. Hear that from this jackass? No, we heard figures not much higher than this for the top 1%.

I don't believe my dental figures and the figures for the healthiest 80% are too low. If anything they are too high. You have to get something wrong with you to spend a significant amount of money on health care. My expenses were for a gallbladder operation that I may not have needed and a trip to the ER I probably shouldn't have taken. That was 4 years ago come September and I haven't seen a doctor since. I might turn up dead, but spending money fooling around doctors offices aren't any guarantees I won't turn up dead anyhow. I think most men stay away from these quacks as long as possible, though many go through the various tests they recommend after age 40. From what I have been told, some of these tests tally a significant portion of what is spent in the US. We may be paying for the client prospecting of the medical industry. Even so, I doubt these tests skew the bottom 80% beyond $1000, but then again, this may be part of the top 20%.

When I was a kid, I recall life expectancy being 70 years of age for a man. We hear over and over again about the wonder of modern medicine, the fantastic inventions of the past 40 years, but what have we received? 2 or 3 years, if my memory serves me correctly. How much of this has to do with environmental improvement? Most people were smoking back then or had smoked for a significant time period and quit. A much larger percentage of people were doing jobs that would probably shorten their lives. The productivity and safety of mining is much better today than then. There is a lot that doesn't relate to the medical industry that extends lives. Auto safety probably saves 50,000 or more lives a year and prevents maybe an even larger number of life shortening injuries. That one factor probably put 1/2 a year onto life expectancy since the 1960's.

I don't know what all counts as health care. Does Medicaid provided nursing home care go into the mix? Private care? If so, this figure is nearly as much as the figures this doctor spouted. Again, I narrowed the population into an 80/20 split and the worst year in my life, I didn't make the 20% average of $35,000. Do the math. Even if you double the $300 billion figure for the 80% to $600 billion, that still leaves $1.9 trillion or so for the 60 million in the 20%. This is still an over $30,000 a year average. If we are looking at 5 year averages for pools, you could have a moderately major procedure done during that time and probably still be in the 80%. My worst 5 year period, which included an operation to remove my gallbladder and the ER scam totaled about $25,000, which is less than the annual average of the top 20% sector I generated. The prior 10 years, I spent nothing, giving a 15 year average under the average figure I used. Even if one wants to debate this, they could say that I fell into the bottom 20% one year and wasn't there the other 14 or you could count the ER visit as another violation, but then again, I think that would still keep me in the 80% pool, figuring that is an average of zero to some figure, far from the $30,000 a year average.

I think this bare discussion, based on assumptions that I doubt on the broad pool are that far off. This split says we are spending about 20% of health care on 80% of the people and 80% on 20%. I think it is worse than this, maybe 90% on 10% and 10% on 90% in any given year. This makes sense too, because auto collision repair would only include those that had wrecks in a given year. I doubt over 10% of people have physical wrecks in a given year.

So what is the catch? If you have many water leaks that total 5000 gallons a day, I doubt you start with the faucet that drips 10 gallons a day. No, you go to the busted line. Not knowing, I would start with Pharmacy. My suspicion is you could cut $200 billion a year right there and there would still be plenty of profit. Maybe in return, the government could throw the Pharmaceutical industry a bone is subsidies for R&D upon application. But, I venture the fly in the ointment there is distribution.

The big deal, it appears to me is the high ticket items. The list that will or can be paid out of insurance should be narrowed. People that don't have money should have to go to government hospitals or clinics and we should keep these people out of the private system. There is a $1 trillion hole, minimum in the US system that has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of care.

1) Pharmaceutical companies operate on a paradigm of each drug should incrementally increase life expectancy by a statistically significant number ... say 2 months instead of cure. By their own admission they wish to turn cancer into a chronic illness and treat patients with expensive "maintenance therapy." There is no money in a cure.

2) They train their armies of drug salesmen to teach doctors how to identify and counteract patients who want BSC (best supportive care) instead of an extra 2 months of poor quality life suffering from the toxic side effects of chemotherapy, and turn them into consumer patients who want the latest and most expensive drug treatment. They are labeled as depressed and suicidal if they decline treatment to coerce them to buy into the system.

3) Oncologists are the best salesmen out there ... bar none. They are better than Wall Street stock jocks and used car salesmen. They really are selling snake oil and toying with people's emotions over death and dying.

4) In addition to their army of salesmen, big pharma and device makers spend millions on armies of lawyers to lobby congress and HHS to pay for their ever expensive drugs and implants and protect their patents against generic competition. The patent laws are drawn up for that purpose.

5) FDA approval of a new treatment for cancer requires that the maker show "non-inferiority" in Phase III trials. That means if Genentech has the standard treatment indicated for say lung cancer, Sanofi-Aventis can develop and market a competing drug without showing it is better. Then they send out their army of salespeople while their scientists run trials to look for other uses of the drug so their lawyers can ask to extend their patent. (This is worldwide.)

6) The Hippocratic Oath says "first do no harm" but doctors/oncologists routinely disregard it because of the money involved.

7) Hospitals are purchased by large corporations which tend to dominate the hospital market in most metropolitan areas because they can then negotiate the highest reimbursements from payors like Medicare Gap and regular insurance companies. The laws are also designed so that they do not have to reveal their costs. How else do you explain that an MRI at a major hospital in California cost twice as much as an MRI at an independent hospital in the same city.

Our healthcare is big business and big profits for big companies, and just like the banks have done for the past 10 years, the drug companies, insurance companies, doctors, lawyers, salespeople and hospital corporations are taking us down a path that is financially unsustainable.

But they will get their money before it collapses.

I haven't been to a doctor in years. All they want me to do is take my blood, stick a finger up my ass and lower my cholesterol with drugs.

My grandmother lived to the age of 93. She refused to go to the doc, take any medications, or leave her two story house for one more "suitable" for an older lady. She always had a garden and finally stopped climbing her trees to prune them when she was in her late 80s. My uncle took her to the hospital for treatment a month before she died, but she refused to get out of the car, and refused treatment from the ER doc who came out in an attempt to talk her into the hospital. My uncle put her into the hospital for the last two days of her life when she was comatose (heart failure) and could no longer refuse to go. She walked to the grocery store and the meat shop because her children took her car away (which is a good thing). She always was a bad driver but got worse with age.

She could have probably survived with treatment, but she did not want to. Her friends and three husbands were dead. She told me that she was tired and ready to go on.

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The big deal, it appears to me is the high ticket items.

Not quite right. There is a drug called colchine used for gout that has been known since the 1st century, maybe longer. It's cheap, effective and once approved by the FDA. It lost its approval as it had never been tested. The FDA gave the testing to URL Pharma, with the agreement that they had exclusive rights to marketing. URL Pharma immediately raised the price from 0.09 to 4.85 per pill. It has been said that this will increase cost to state Medicaid from 1 million/yr. to 50 million/yr.

@Anti, agreed.

@Robertt, not surprised at all. Having a mother with Alzheimer's, I've seen it all.

@Smacktle, LOL.

Mann,
Being in the healthcare profession, I would argue with your numbers about healthcare usage among the majority of Americans. Your usage is not typical. Two-thirds of Americans are overweight. One third are obese. We have an aging population. 80% of expenses are used to treat chronic, preventable disease. The big culprits are conditions like hypertension and diabetes and the chronic effects of these diseases, like congestive heart failure and renal disease. The people on this forum are well-informed and educated. They have healthier diets and lifestyles. Obesity rates are higher among the poor, due to a variety of factors, from cultural to educational to economic (fish costs more than fatty animal meats, fresh produce more than canned). I've taken people for their monthly foodstamp shopping. It's very challenging to buy a month's worth of healthy food, with fish and fresh produce and whole grains, non- processed foods, impossible for $78 (2009 FS allotment for single person). And left to their own devices, they do make poor choices, soda and chips, the same poor choices that the rest of America makes. I would try to educate, but in the end, they were adults and they had the right to make the choices. I was often seen as trying to take away one of their few creature comforts. Very frustrating. And when transportation is an issue, there is a need for one-stop shopping. Prices are higher at grocery stores in poor neighborhoods. If I didn't take them shopping, the corner convenience store ended up being their source of groceries, very expensive.

Its not limited to the poor though. I know plenty who are middle-upper class or higher, I'd say the majority in my baby-boomer age group, who suffer from chronic disease of some type. Again, most are preventable. I have a very good friend who is a critical care nurse, late 50's. He had hypertension and needed to lose about 50 pounds. He's very active. When he started getting winded and having problems while hiking, he went to the doctor. His blood sugar was high and he had to start a third med for his blood pressure. That was his wake-up call. He's seen the end results when you treat the symptoms and ignore the disease. But physicians are complicit in the problem. Patients don't want lectures on losing weight. They want the doctor to fix them, and they'll find one who will.

My friend lost 50 pounds. He doesn't eat at the fast food places while working his transport runs (12 hour shifts transporting critically ill). He eats differently. Today my friend's blood pressure is normal. His blood sugar is normal. He no longer needs any medications. I have another good friend, same situation, a little older. Still 50 pounds overweight, eats typical un-modified American diet while taking blood sugar medication, more medications added as time goes on, more tests and specialists every year. He's had three nuclear stress tests in the last five years, none of which were clinically indicated per AHA guidelines, but his cardiologist owns the facility. He has great private insurance that picks up the tab, what does he care? Most Americans opt to take the pills instead.

ETA: Yes, long term care and all other healthcare, irregardless of who funds it, private out-of-pocket, private insurers, or government funding, is included in healthcare figures (or should be, and the ones I look at, the ones that state per capita use at $7300 for 2009)

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80% of expenses are used to treat chronic, preventable disease. The big culprits are conditions like hypertension and diabetes and the chronic effects of these diseases, like congestive heart failure and renal disease.

....

I would try to educate, but in the end, they were adults and they had the right to make the choices.

The answer is quite simple:

Having made that choice, and it IS their choice, they do NOT have the right to bill the consequences of that choice to others.

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The answer is quite simple:

Having made that choice, and it IS their choice, they do NOT have the right to bill the consequences of that choice to others.

This may not be what you want to hear, but again where does it end.

The same logic can be and apparently has been applied to Bright Scholars. If you choose not to fill out FAFSA, you don't have the right to bill the consequences of that choice to the state.

Personally, I don't think its a morally correct position in either case. People shouldn't be stripped of fundamental human dignity, e.g. being allowed to choose which food they want to eat.

So I can **** anything I want, anywhere I want, and if I get a $500,000 medical bill (AIDS, ultimately death, etc) you have to pay for it?

If I eat myself to death, you have to pay for it?

Incidentally, there is no comparison with "Bright Futures." That is allegedly a MERIT scholarship. Either call it what it is - a handout to poor people - or adhere to what you CALL SOMETHING. If you LIE to my kid and tell her that if she excels academically she has EARNED such a scholarship, and it's a lie, she should sue your ass off or better, feed you feet-first into a woodchipper when she discovers that you INTENTIONALLY misled her into putting effort into a path you had NO INTENTION of actually performing upon.

There is no analog between these two positions, but I see that once again you've applied the "human dignity" crap line to the right to bill SOMEONE ELSE for choices you make, whether they be to have 15 kids, **** every gay man in the bar without a condom, prostitute yourself without rubbers on the street, inject drugs using unclean "works", drink, smoke, or eat yourself to death.

That's beyond communism ("From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs") and well into raw fascism. There is absolutely no difference in quality or fact between your position and advocating that you have the right to break into my home at 3:00 AM and steal whatever food sates your hunger if you have no money to buy it, and that I have no right to stop you from literally stealing anything you believe you have a "higher purpose" for than I do.

If that's what you truly believe this is the wrong forum for you and I'll be more than happy to show you where the door is.

The tricky part, of course, is drawing that line between 'you made that choice' and 'nature handed you half a deck'.
Morbidly obese and smoking two packs a day? Easy answer.
Twenty to thirty pounds overweight depending on the season, BP of 140/90, and beginning stages of Type II diabetes and hypertension...not so easy.
At some point, somebody starts playing God (or roulette). I, for one, don't want anyone in .gov (or anyone outside of immediate family) deciding who lives and who dies in my OR.

A huge problem I see is lack of initiative at the individual level. Most of us shell out hundreds a month to have the latest/greatest phone, Fios, TV/ etc. We upgrade our (leased) car every three years to a more recent model. We eat out far too often. Yet, we have no 'rainy day fund' for health care expenses. It's as though we expect our most precious asset to require no maintenance, no upkeep, and no expense.

As far as medicine not increasing our quality of life...nonsense. Polio vaccine. Water fluoridation. Pain meds. Microsurgeries/ laproscopic procedures/ microvascular surgery. Beta blockers. Cardiology alone has come along a tremendous amount in the past 25 years.

We can proclaim ourselves rock stars and state 'I'll live fast and die hard'. Back to reality - go talk to someone who just came out of ICU and is holding hands with their children/ wife/ etc. because their heart surgery was successful (and will most likely add a decade or more to their lifespan).

There's a lot of fluff in the med industry, no doubt. There are also a lot of people wide awake at 3 in the morning so you might have a second chance.

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At some point, somebody starts playing God (or roulette). I, for one, don't want anyone in .gov (or anyone outside of immediate family) deciding who lives and who dies in my OR.

Sorry, that's not possible. Your ability to have these things is always determined at some level by the amount of funding available.

We can ration by price and individual capacity to pay or we can ration by some jackbooted function, commonly called "government."

The former allows for compassion which is doled out by humans. We call that "charity" - some is organized and some not. Doesn't matter; it's voluntary.

The latter is inevitably achieved by shoving a gun up someone's ass and demanding they fork over the money or you'll blow their brains out the long way.

For a profession that claims "first, do no harm" anyone in that profession advocating the government path should, in my opinion, immediately lose their medical license.

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I, for one, don't want anyone in .gov (or anyone outside of immediate family) deciding who lives and who dies in my OR.

So, to clear YOUR conscience, you treat them and hand ME the bill for their choices/care, and you seem perfectly OK with that. That's interesting.

If you don't want someone else "playing God" in your ER, then why don't YOU provide the services free of charge. Your choice, your cost.
BUT YOU CAN KEEP YOUR ****ING HANDS OUT OF MY POCKETS FOR YOUR BLEEDING HEART CHOICE THOUGH!

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We can ration by price and individual capacity to pay or we can ration by some jackbooted function, commonly called "government."

The former allows for compassion which is doled out by humans. We call that "charity" - some is organized and some not. Doesn't matter; it's voluntary.

The latter is inevitably achieved by shoving a gun up someone's ass and demanding they fork over the money or you'll blow their brains out the long way.

Take a moment to read this again, and apply it to everything. You have to have capitalism, or give up your freedom. I'll add in case its not obvious that if the government decides to let you die or decides to take from you - you can legitimately be upset with no recourse. If you run out of money thats your own damn fault and encourages you to work harder and take care of friends and family. You want a life of anger at those in charge or a life of hard work and family?

Psquared wrote..

...the drug companies, insurance companies, doctors, lawyers, salespeople and hospital corporations are taking us down a path that is financially unsustainable.

But why do you fail to mention the biggest factor of all? The patients themselves. The general public.
If one doesn't have preventable problems in the first place, one's demand for treatment is zero, regardless of whether the cost is $1,000,000 or $1.
I would like to submit that the main problem isn't health care costs, but rather health care expenditures.

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...it is estimated that health care costs for chronic disease treatment account for over 75% of national health expenditures.
Chronic diseases – such as heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, and arthritis – are among the most common, costly, and preventable of all health problems in the U.S.
Four modifiable health risk behaviors—lack of physical activity, poor nutrition, tobacco use, and excessive alcohol consumption—are responsible for much of the illness, suffering, and early death related to chronic diseases.

http://www.kaiseredu.org/Issue-Modules/U....
http://www.cdc.gov/chronicdisease/overvi....

And this report from today:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43670705/ns/....

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In 1995, no state had an obesity rate above 20 percent. Now, all but one does....The report released on Thursday showed that over the past 15 years, seven states have doubled their rate of obesity and 10 states have doubled their rate of diabetes.

The doctor in the video, although he does identify the cost problem to a certain extent, still tries to focus on "supply" solutions for cost-cutting more than prevention. He does say that part of the problem is that Americans "ask for" (demand) more health care (true), but then he absurdly says it's because we're the richest country. On a per capita basis, many countries as rich as we are have half the expenditures .
Health care expenditures are primarily demand-driven, and the main problem is not a cost problem so much as it is an expenditure problem.
If more people lived like Swampwoman's granny (see above), not only would health care expenditures go down, but they would have a more enjoyable life as well.