…Cannot survive”. Mark Steyn:
When President Barack Obama tells you he’s “reforming” health care to “control costs,” the point to remember is that the only way to “control costs” in health care is to have less of it. In a government system, the doctor, the nurse, the janitor and the Assistant Deputy Associate Director of Cost-Control System Management all have to be paid every Friday, so the sole means of “controlling costs” is to restrict the patient’s access to treatment. In the Province of Quebec, patients with severe incontinence – i.e., they’re in the bathroom 12 times a night – wait three years for a simple 30-minute procedure. True, Quebeckers have a year or two on Americans in the life expectancy hit parade, but, if you’re making 12 trips a night to the john 365 times a year for three years, in terms of life-spent-outside-the-bathroom expectancy, an uninsured Vermonter may actually come out ahead.
As Louis XV is said to have predicted, “Après moi, le deluge” – which seems as incisive an observation as any on a world in which freeborn citizens of the wealthiest societies in human history are content to rise from their beds every half-hour every night and traipse to the toilet for yet another flush simply because a government bureaucracy orders them to do so. “Health” is potentially a big-ticket item, but so’s a house and a car, and most folks manage to handle those without a Government Accommodation Plan or a Government Motor Vehicles System – or, at any rate, they did in pre-bailout America.
More importantly, there is a cost to governmentalizing every responsibility of adulthood – and it is, in Lord Whitelaw’s phrase, the stirring up of apathy…..
It is frightening to see how many people are willing to give their freedom away, to submit to bureaucratic control of every facet of their lives and vote themselves into bondage. Go read the whole thing.
I think I disagree with your opening premise….
And I’d like to see some experimentation before we accept your assertion.
Without lowering the quality or quantity of patient-befitting care, let us drive to zero the senseless bureaucracy, the requirements for defensive medicine, and the practice of mining medicine for millions of dollars in senseless and pointless “damage” suits.
With regard to the latter, let’s split the action up.
Step 0ne–A hearing (sortakinda like a criminal arraignment) where the court determines that there is or is not probable cause to continue. Plaintiff attorneys directed by the court to pay the defense expenses and fees if no probable cause is found.
Step two–prove that the doctor, hospital or other care provider made a damaging and preventable error through negligence, malfeasance, or maliciousness. Plaintiff attorneys directed by the court to pay the defense expenses and fees if no cause to proceed is found.
Step three, determine the (to the best of the courts ability) the actual damages expressed as dollars. Award that amount to the victim, and a flat fee paid to the victim’s attorneys. Defense pays its own attorneys.
Step four, determine if and what punitive damages are to be levied with the victim no longer part of the proceeding except as a witness. Punitive damages, if levied, paid into a fund for education or other palliative measures to prevent a recurrence of the damaging situation.