Bureaucratizing private medicine: "In the late 1970s, the Supreme Court decided the antitrust laws should apply to 'professionals' such as lawyers and physicians. In 1993, lawyers at the FTC and the DOJ's Antitrust Division made up a set of rules governing how physicians and other health care providers should run their businesses. To avoid antitrust charges, independent physicians had to organize their practices according to a government-approved economic model. Experimentation or deviation from this model would subject doctors to criminal price-fixing charges on top of potential treble-damage civil lawsuits."




OVERALL STATISTICS MISLEADING

"The United States spends more on health care than any country on earth -- nearly 15 percent of its overall economy. That's nearly a half again as much as other countries and on a per capita basis, no one else is even close. Yet if one looks at the performance of our health care system, we're clearly not getting what we pay for. "USA Today" last week published a list of the top 50 countries in terms of life expectancy. The United States ranked third from the bottom. That's right. We're number 48. This year, Americans can expect an average life span of 77.4 years, nearly four years behind the Japanese... "

A quick look at the Centers for Disease Control website at health disparities in the United States gives a few clues about why our health care system performs so poorly despite outlandish costs. While the overall U.S. life expectancy rate is 77 years, the rate for blacks is about 72 years with black males at a Third World-level of 68 years...... It's not middle-class moms in suburban hospitals losing babies. It's poor mothers without prenatal care. It's teenagers who hide their pregnancies, deliver low birth weight babies and have few support systems to help them care for their newborns.....

In this election season, by all means let's have a debate about how to provide health insurance to the 43 million Americans without it. But let's also talk about who in this society suffers from ill health, why they suffer and what can be done about the social and economic disparities that lead to ill health. It will take more than universal insurance coverage to tackle those issues.

More here.

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL hospitals and health insurance schemes should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the very poor and minimal regulation.

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