It's time for another gun threadFollow

What are these profit strangling regulations you speak of?

All industries deal with regulations to protect the consumer. While the drug producing companies may indeed have to do an inordinate amount of testing with their drugs before they can go to market, government regulation has not caused them undue financial hardship.

The costs of health care are being driven up by insurance companies, malpractice protection and the basic market principles that drive any market restricted by its high degree of specialization.

Want to take a guess why it costs that much?

Do you know any Doctors? Ask them.

It's a bit of a chicken and egg situation. There is vast amounts of money which flows through the health care system, but only if you are part of it. Try opening up a practice without being on some approved list of health care providers and see what happens...

And if you do sign up, part of the deal is that you have to follow a set of byzantine rules which are designed not to ensure the best care to the patients, but to protect the deep pockets of those organizations through which the money flows. Ultimately, this is all traceable to government health care programs, which form the core of these systems.


Part of it is an opportunity cost issue. Once the government gets heavily involved, the private parts of the industry stop working properly. That's because government does not have to follow any sort of bottom line requirements, and thus can't be effectively competed against. And the more providers who "join up", the worse things get.



But not from lack of trying. Bringing up an issue in which there is an ongoing fight to cause exactly the sort of undue financial hardship you're talking about in the name of "lower costs" kinda defeats it's use as an argument. It's funny that government doesn't care about lower costs when it's entering into an industry and wants to squeeze out the private players, but it's suddenly a huge deal once it's got it's fingers into the pie.



Well. The tort reform thing would help. But ask why lawsuits for malpractice are so staggeringly huge. It's exactly because of the deep pockets involved. Penalties tend to scale to the size of the pockets. When the pockets are privately owned hospitals and nothing else, the settlements are commensurate to their wealth. When the government is funding the programs which paid for the care which went awry, there are no limits. Those become the "normal" settlements, and yet another tool for squeezing out the private player appears.


The largest component of malpractice suit risk is punitive. Take away the government at the end of the rainbow and the size of the settlements go back to just being about the actual cost of the injury.


And that aspect creeps into more than just the lawsuits. It's about the cost of care as well. When the government is footing the bill, costs tend to go up at every level. From the orderly who takes a longer lunch break than he should, to the doctors who over prescribe medication, to the nurses who waste supplies because they know they'll just be restocked. The handiman who charges more to do work at the hospital than at someone's house, or the contractor who does the same, or the delivery services, etc... All related costs go up when there's a perception that the customer can afford more. Add in union contracts for everything and prices skyrocket even more.


My cousin started working as an administrator in a hospital a couple years ago. He'd worked in purely private sector jobs his entire life up until then. You know. Ones that have to show a profit and constantly keep costs down. He was absolutely shocked at the amount of slack, waste, and general ridiculousness that he saw. That's why health care costs so much. It's all connected into one big pool and ultimately connected to a government umbilical cord. We may call it private, but there is so much entanglement with the government that it's laughable to say that as anything other than a joke.

I have rarely had health insurance. I almost always pay out of pocket at the doctor's office. He knows this, and is careful of cost when he prescribes my treatments.

I remember having a conversation with him not long back about health care costs, and he specifically stated that pharmaceutical companies being run, with little regulation, for-profit, is the reason that health care costs are so high.

While I did say "Ask a doctor", I've got to call BS on this.



How on earth does pharmaceutical costs affect the cost of going in to get a checkup? It doesn't unless the guy doing the checkup is part of a larger system in which the costs for drugs is subsidized by the cost for care. That's regulation at work. I'm not placing blame on a "side" here. The Pharmaceutical companies are to blame as much as punitive damages or unions. My point is that free markets tend to fail to work properly when government gets involved. You're pointing at a symptom, and not the cause.

The drug companies can overcharge for their drugs because they know that the cost will be born by the "system", the bulk of which will be paid for by insurers, which in turn are repaid to a large extent by government funded programs like medicare and medicaid. And certainly, there's some back-scratching going on in both directions, but ultimately it's what happens when you have people controlling someone else's money.

If it's your money and your profits at stake, you'll seek to pay the least amount for the most you can get. When all participants in a market are doing that, the system works. If a large enough player (like the government), comes in and does not have said profit motive (like the government), it breaks the system. The private components will seek to gain as much profit as possible and bend the rules to do so. Those running the government component become subject to back scratching, because they gain from the back-scratch, but the cost for whatever they give away is passed on to the taxpayer. The profit motive, instead of producing the best goods at the lowest price, ends out doing the exact opposite.


That is not the fault of the private market seeking profits. It's not wrong for them to do that. What's wrong is building a system in which doing that comes, not as a result of producing the best good for the lowest price, but by manipulating a government program to funnel money to your pockets from the taxpayers. The correct way to prevent this is to get the government out of the health care industry (as much as possible), not the other way around.

Hi FUcking moron. I'm gbaji. Nice to meet ya!

Maybe when you're done doing that, you can answer the question.

I'm sorry. I assumed from my statement that you understood that I have spoken to doctors and others in the field, and the answers as to why costs are so high were in my post. My former roommate's father was a Doctor. I've mentioned him before and the huge mess dealing with poor pregnant women was. My cousin works in a hospital. Heck. I was talking to a group of Urologists he works with at his Bachelor Party just last Fall (which was amusing all by itself). Same deal.

While the stereotypical "drugs cost a lot!!!" answer is often the default knee-jerk reaction, most medical professionals in the US, if you have a bit longer conversation with them and let them give a more detailed answer, will usually point at the interrelation between the insurance companies and the government as the source cause of most of the cost silliness.

Hi, I'm from Canada. If I have a kid with a medical condition I won't go bankrupt.

Edited, Apr 9th 2009 10:55pm by Xsarus

we're all robots!

No, it really was NOT time for yet another gun control thread.



Pure gold.

No wonder he needs a gun for protection... with a name like "Jan"

He probably has to use it to keep his 11 year old son for beating him up for having such a stupid name.