Medary.com

Our medical system.

An essay in the New York Times:

Not long ago, fed up with what he perceived as a loss of professional autonomy, Dr. Bhupinder Singh, 42, a general internist in New York, sold his practice and went to work part time at a hospital in Queens.

“I’d write a prescription,” he told me, “and then insurance companies would put restrictions on almost every medication. I’d get a call: ‘Drug not covered. Write a different prescription or get preauthorization.’ If I ordered an M.R.I., I’d have to explain to a clerk why I wanted to do the test. I felt handcuffed. It was a big, big headache.”

The problem with the American system of medicine, in my opinion, is precisely that the concept that medical insurance should "cover" anything and everything but the most extreme maladies.  No other major economic element of our society is organized like that.  Everywhere else, it's a matter of "what can you afford."  The only reason why health care is any different is that we're unreasonably emotional about it.  Emphasis on "unreasonably."

You are entitled to the health care you can afford, just like you're entitled to the house you can afford, the car you can afford, the vacation you can afford, the clothes you can afford.  Life isn't fair.  Some people live in shacks, some live in mansions.  You don't make things better by taking people out of their shacks and giving them mansions, despite that meaningful life lesson provided by "The Beverly Hillbillies."

An economic system which utterly divorces price information from the consumer.  Today, in medicine, for a patient, money is no object--all that's important is getting the pill, the treatment, the operation.  Yes, it's hard to ask someone who's in pain "can you afford this?"  But our failure to take that necessary step dooms the entire medical system to certain failure.  The surprise is not that the health care system is in crisis, the surprise is that it's working at all.

Many, I'm sure, will be troubled by the harsh, cold, uncaring tone of what I'm saying.  How can I possibly be opposed to ensuring that everyone has the best possible health care?

Easy.  The same way I'm opposed to everyone owning mansions that they did nothing to earn.

Sixty bloody, dirty, corrupt, wasteful, lost years of the Soviet Union and world communism should have proved to the world that you can't repeal or override the fundamental laws of economics.  But I'm afraid that will be a lesson that humanity is doomed to learn and re-learn for a long, long, long time.

How did all of those 1960's housing projects turn out, anyway?