Adam Smith, who is considered to be quite the capitalist, said that it is impossible to have a free market if the participants cannot choose not to participate.
Letting Doctors use the “free market” set medical prices is not only sinful, it is not justifiable by the most originalist economic theory.
Blaming doctors for insurance, pharmaceutical, and healthcare companies prices is a bit rich.
Letting capitalists into healthcare is the issue, not the fucking doctors. Shit the doctors are probably just as indebted to their student loans as their patients are to the hospitals, while getting reamed with fucked 24/36 hour shifts and overworked to the bone.
People don't seem to understand that the entire medical profession is structured around exploitation — where they still expect you to work 80+ hour weeks back to back, often with shifts that last 18+ hours, and a few hours sleep in between.
Lumping the medical scientists/professionals with medical capitalists is class warfare.
My primary care doctor of 20+ years just quit the practice. He confided in me that it just wasn't worth it for him to keep dealing with the crazy demands and dwindling rewards. He is one of about 150k doctors who left the profession in the last couple years.
The ACA was supposed to have a public option that would put a control on the insurance prices. Ideally the public option would be so good that the insurance industry would just wither and die.
But the health insurance industry, mainly via Joe Lieberman, made sure that was never going to happen.
Universal healthcare > cheap ACA insurance
Don’t settle for less.
Don't settle, but at least accept while still demanding more.
Nothing is served by wallowing in failure by only accepting non-existent perfection.
Momentum matters.
Accepting a bone here and there stops many from being hungry enough to demand more. It’s the whole reason Bismarck invented State Socialism to stop the growing threat of leftist ideas.
It was meant to be the first step in a progression that would have led to universal healthcare. Unfortunately, America figured out how to maim it and halt progress. In fact, America figured out how to regress in so many ways, not just in the arena of healthcare.
Only America can fail as hard and fast as America once succeeded.
Don't forget Joe Lieberman is one of the founders of the No Labels party.
If you want to know who NOT to trust, check the link
The website looks like all Sunshine and rainbows.
Now I'm really curious why they can't be trusted.
Jmho. As a political party you need a platform, as far as I can tell No Labels platform is "can't we all just get along?"
Also their members make up a who's who of keeping actual legislation from happening, starting with Joe Lieberman for removing a single pair option from the ACA. Rumor has it they have courted Kristen Simena and Joe's manchin.
Also Harland Crowe is rumored to be a big funder, as far as I'm concerned these people represent money and nothing else.
Letting Doctors use the “free market” set medical prices is not only sinful, it is not justifiable by the most originalist economic theory.
That's not even what's happening. It's vampire middlemen setting the prices, which is even worse.
Unfortunately Capitalism by its very nature abhors a free market. Free markets mean more competition, which means less profits. Which is counter to the ideology of capitalism, that being higher profits mean success.
Capitalism is fundamentally unstable and will devolve into monopoly and autocracy if not regulated to prevent it.
You do everything right and still lose it all - our capitalistic system is working exactly the way it is intended.
I hate the US healthcare system so much. So much stress for so many people for so little reason.
There's a reason why literally no developed country in the world is imitating that system. It's broken and it doesn't work for most people.
If only either political party in America agreed...
We're stuck with only a small slice of Dems that even acknowledge our system is fucked.
And you keep going with them or whomever is fighting for the people.
Vote with your heart in the primary, and your brain in the general.
Which is why it sucks so much we don't get primaries every election.
People are literally dying from inaction in America, and we really don't have any say it.
Be careful with that. It was the infighting that kept people home in 2016.
No it wasn’t. It was the DNC cheating at its own game to support Hillary- who was deeply unpopular- that kept people at home.
You can blame other candidates being better all you want. The reality is, Hilary was and Biden is a bad candidate.
"how can Biden be a bad candidate if he won?"
- dnc shills together in unison
we have to move farther right since we lost
🙌
Only voice saying that is in your head.
Sorry but getting more Votes is not defined as cheating. I didn't blame any candidates, I blame the idiots butt hurt for staying home. Add in the "Vote third party to send a message" idiots and you get 2016 in a nutshell. Please note: it wasn't Bernie Voters as they mostly did Vote. But all the "teach Dems a lesson" did was elect Trump. And that is all the fools whining about Biden shall do.
it wasn't a fair process to begin with, the DNC ran it's primary so as to prevent Bernie from ever getting that election. and they did it because, as a socialist, he's antithetical to the interests that control the DNC. that is, the corporate elite.
they really should just say "fuck it", stop doing primary elections and just appoint whoever they want. It'd be more honest than the dog and pony show we currently have for primaries.
so, you think it is reliable to accept the Russian provided DNC emails at face value? 'cause that is what that wikileaks garbage is. No chance it was modified or edited to push the exact narrative you bought into?
"Well, you know Chuck, again these are connected to a Russian government propaganda effort to destabilize the election," Kaine responded.
Kaine later added: "The one (email) that has referred to me was flat-out completely incorrect. So I don’t know whether it was doctored or whether the person sending it didn’t know what they were talking about. Clearly, I think there’s a capacity for much of the information in them to be wrong."
Experts told PolitiFact that there is precedent to support Kaine’s claim. While most of the emails are probably unaltered, they said there is a chance that at least a few have been tampered with in some way.
"I've looked at a lot of document dumps provided by hacker groups over the years, and in almost every case you can find a few altered or entirely falsified documents," said Jeffrey Carr, CEO of cybersecurity firm Taia Global. "But only a few. The vast majority were genuine. I believe that's the case with the Podesta emails, as well."
"I would be shocked if the emails weren't altered," said Jamie Winterton, director of strategy for Arizona State University’s Global Security Initiative, citing Russia’s long history of spreading disinformation.
However, some of the emails in the WikiLeaks dump — especially among emails sent to Podesta — don’t have these signatures and can’t be technically verified. And digital signature verification wouldn’t detect tampering by omission, like if the hackers were to withhold certain emails.
I appreciate that you believe it, but those are at best questionable.
If they're not... that's pretty easy to show. Instead, the DNC has apologized for them. But yeah. I'm the one buying a narrative. We also have records of them, you know, doing the things that the emails say they did- like blocking Bernie from accessing voter rolls so he couldn't send mailers or otherwise contact them.
The leak wouldn't have been as impactful if they weren't, you know, actively undermining candidates in contradiction to their own convention's bylaws. But, yes, RuSsIaNs. it's all the rUsSiAnS fault.
Had they shown proof all it would have accomplished is have folks like you claiming the DNC faked them.
And yes, the Russians were behind the stolen emails of both DNC and RNC. Wonder why only the DNC was published by their propaganda front? The Russian source and their support for Mango Mussolini are both well documented. That you are trying to pretend otherwise fairly well condemns your PoV as entire fantasy. Nice try to further muddy the waters, shrub.
Like, there's plenty of shit there, and yes, there's probably some emails that were altered to make it look worse than it was.
But you're blatantly ignoring a simple fact that they did these things, and that if they had not done these things, it would be pretty simple to demonstrate otherwise. Instead the the leader of the DNC stepped down, and they issued apologies and continued on, fate acompli. The Russians didn't make them cheat. The Russians weren't even the first ones to go there.
all of which comes back to the broader discussion that biden is an objectively bad candidate, but he's the one democrats will put forward, and instead of doing something to attract voters who patently do not like biden, whine and bitch and moan about how it's their voter's fault.
Boomers gonna boom, I guess.
Julian assange is a journalist. I trust him to have done his homework.
He is a self promoting opportunist and was actively fighting to avoid deportation to the US. He is at best a biased useful tool for disseminating propaganda.
And no, he is in no way a journalist.
Julian Paul Assange is an Australian computer programmer, editor, publisher, and activist who founded WikiLeaks in 2006.
The "idiots" who voted third party went 3:1 for the Libertarian party. The Greens got 1% of the vote, and I'll bet a good portion of those would have picked Trump if forced to pick one or the other.
It's not third party voters, it's voters who stay home. If you think you can berate people into showing up for a shitty candidate, then you are delusional.
No it wasn't, it was trying to force Hillary Clinton down our throats.
She won the primary, but spent all her money in the primary and did almost zero opposition research on trump.
Because Hillary Clinton is remarkably unpopular, she has zero charisma. A life time in politics and her only elected office was a completely safe Blue Senate seat for a state she never lived in after essentially an uncontested primary.
The party put all our eggs in a basket with a giant hole in the bottom, because she spent decades stacking up political favors and called them all in.
Bernie could have pulled off an Obama, but the party learned their lesson the last time voters overruled the party. That's why they switched to the strategy and actual legal defense of "it's my party and I'll influence the results if I want".
I don't know how accurate your analysis is, but it affirms my bias so I like the story you tell.
None of that is accurate, but you believe it because you bought into the whining bull shit from 2016.
Bullshit. It was apathy tangential to despair. Infighting happens in the tiny percentage of voters who are actually engaged in and educated about the political system. They don't stay home on election day. It's the average apolitical Americans who looked at Hillary and saw no point in dragging themselves to the polls. The whole "infighting" thing was just a way for the establishment to shift the blame.
I am tired of this. Is anyone actually working on solutions or are we just going to complain?
What would it take to setup a low cost health care clinic and hospital that is covering it's marginal costs?
There is a current movement called Direct Primary Care, where you sign up to a binding agreement to pay a continuing monthly subscription fee that covers your office visits, and your labs and prescriptions are also discounted. So it's possible. And it sounds absolutely fantastic upfront.
But the problem there is that places that do not accept insurance and/or Medicaid and Medicare are also not governed by HIPAA and other state and federal healthcare laws, something most people don't even know until they find out the hard way. I have a relative who thought DPC was the best thing since sliced bread until she found out that all the strange tests she kept being told she needed were not actually for her, and she was actually being submitted to various clinical trials without her knowledge and against her directly expressed wishes, for symptoms and diseases she's never even had.
So now she's paying for a monthly DPC subscription she can't use because she's afraid of them and refuses to go back. They won't even give her her medical records (not surprising, because that practice is all a clinical trial fraud scam so they'd be a work of fiction anyway). And she doesn't have a lot of money to start with; she can go to an urgent care place if she needs something immediate, I suppose.
But if you break a DPC agreement, you have to pay full value for every office visit you ever had, every non-billable service under the agreement, and it gets added up against the monthly subscription fees you've been paying. These agreements are written so as to be difficult to break (pick one and look for the following "Termination" language):
If this agreement is terminated or held to be invalid or unenforceable for any reason, you agree to pay practice an amount equal to the fair market value of the services actually rendered to you during the period of time for which the fees were paid commensurate with prevailing rates in the practice area . . .
So yeah, DPC is great in theory, as long as in practice it's not just a front end for some other medical scam, because they lack oversight and are exempt from all the consumer protections built into insurance-oriented laws like HIPAA. There is no recourse with these non-insurance places, because insurance laws are also pretty much the only consumer protection laws with teeth that exist in the doctor-patient relationship, and very few states have any legislative experience with, much less written law, in regard to Direct Primary Care. We're trying to find an attorney that knows enough about it to be able to assist, but even that's a challenge.
I don't know if fraud was the primary intention of Direct Primary Care, but because of the way it is structured it absolutely attracts the bottom feeders of medical practice who want to pull in otherwise underserved (uninsured, poor, undocumented) patients for some kind of economic exploitation.
That story is pretty horrific.
Yeah, and it's still ongoing. She can leave and get hit with an as-yet-unknown fee/bill, or she can stay and not have her own needs addressed but be pressured into carrying on underwriting her own clinical trial eligibility tests.
She's terrified of setting foot in there now because when she started to argue she'd never had [whatever] and didn't need these tests they got really aggressive. Not physical, just verbally hard hitting, like abruptly changing the subject and then coming back around to it two minutes later to insist she needs this, and doing that over and over again, ignoring or twisting anything she tried to say in reply, and this was at the end of a day long fast for blood tests. There's more, just petty shit like you'd expect from a high-pressure con, but that's the kind of thing.
Fortunately the tests she was objecting to were not common, and she has an in-law who is retired from medicine, so when she asked him what was going on and named the tests they wanted he was able to cotton on pretty quickly and at least tell her it had nothing to do with her or her own needs.
But the only red flag up front was that they have ZERO local reviews. None. They have pay-to-play awards like "best in town" in a local newspaper, and NOTHING else anywhere. That was odd. Now we know why.
I don't see how this ends well. She'll either pay some fat bill or end up in court, none of which has anything to do with the healthcare she signed up for. I wrote all this so that maybe someone thinking about DPC will think twice before they sign up.
Thank you for sharing this story. Things can only change is the abuses are shared with many people.
I am sorry she is going through this.
Thank you. I don't mind saying it's scary as hell.
That really sounds like some dystopian science fiction novel. But I guess that's true for a lot of things going on in the US right now.
That really sounds like some dystopian science fiction novel.
Funny you should say that. When she first told me what was going on, my mind immediately went back to that Robin Cook novel Coma from the 70s, lol.
Probably a justice system where you can't be sued for 150 bajilion for every time someone slips on wet floor. And where health insurance does not expect you to give them 95% discount because every other hospital does. Among other things.
I don't know. How would you get around malpractice insurance and deal with the competition that has economy of scale?
Malpractice insurance is not infinitely expensive.
As for economies of scale, there are not a lot of them. One doctor and one patient.
Ok it isn't bloody free either. What do you mean there is not a lot of them? Have you been to any clinic the past 30 years? Look at all the gear they got. What about medications? They aren't going to be able to buy in bulk. It feels like every single doc I have met in my life tried at least once to go into private practice and struggled.
But hey if these are easy to defeat problems I am all for someone doing it. Open up a clinic and run it at cost and donations. Take no insurance and somehow find a way.
Malpractice insurance accounts for about 2.4% of overall healthcare costs in the US. Meanwhile, healthcare costs are going up at around 4% a year. So, let's assume malpractice never really happens (ha) and we can entirely eliminate that cost by outlawing malpractice suits completely. Great, we just solved half a year of healthcare inflation.
Do you know what "marginal cost" means?
Edit: that was more aggressive than is helpful.
Marginal costs capture the costs for helping one more patient, so most of the issues presented are handled. Fix costs cover the cost of equipment that can be reused without additional costs. Fixed costs can be paid for with "one time" money like grants and donations.
do what everyone else is doing
vote biden he promises to fix it
set* up* a low-cost health-care clinic
covering its* marginal costs
It's finally working!!! We're nearly fully incorporated in the profit-machine! I hope the billionaires notice me for a moment so that I can feel like I'm one of them
He looked at me! WITNESS ME!!!
As intended. We are a capitalism. As long as we are, capital shall be God. As long as They who have the most money shall prevail, they who have the most money will prevail.
Capitalism is OK as long as it is regulated. The free market is nearly a myth because of Billionaires.
Here I am. Sitting in a private room with my son at one of the best children's hospitals in the world. 5 therapy sessions a day. And all I have to worry about is food for me and the wife. I used to bug my dad about moving to Canada. Now I thank him.
Adam Smith, who is considered to be quite the capitalist, said that it is impossible to have a free market if the participants cannot choose not to participate.
Letting Doctors use the “free market” set medical prices is not only sinful, it is not justifiable by the most originalist economic theory.
Blaming doctors for insurance, pharmaceutical, and healthcare companies prices is a bit rich.
Letting capitalists into healthcare is the issue, not the fucking doctors. Shit the doctors are probably just as indebted to their student loans as their patients are to the hospitals, while getting reamed with fucked 24/36 hour shifts and overworked to the bone.
People don't seem to understand that the entire medical profession is structured around exploitation — where they still expect you to work 80+ hour weeks back to back, often with shifts that last 18+ hours, and a few hours sleep in between.
Lumping the medical scientists/professionals with medical capitalists is class warfare.
My primary care doctor of 20+ years just quit the practice. He confided in me that it just wasn't worth it for him to keep dealing with the crazy demands and dwindling rewards. He is one of about 150k doctors who left the profession in the last couple years.
The ACA was supposed to have a public option that would put a control on the insurance prices. Ideally the public option would be so good that the insurance industry would just wither and die.
But the health insurance industry, mainly via Joe Lieberman, made sure that was never going to happen.
Universal healthcare > cheap ACA insurance
Don’t settle for less.
Don't settle, but at least accept while still demanding more.
Nothing is served by wallowing in failure by only accepting non-existent perfection.
Momentum matters.
Accepting a bone here and there stops many from being hungry enough to demand more. It’s the whole reason Bismarck invented State Socialism to stop the growing threat of leftist ideas.
It was meant to be the first step in a progression that would have led to universal healthcare. Unfortunately, America figured out how to maim it and halt progress. In fact, America figured out how to regress in so many ways, not just in the arena of healthcare.
Only America can fail as hard and fast as America once succeeded.
Don't forget Joe Lieberman is one of the founders of the No Labels party.
https://www.nolabels.org/meettheteam
If you want to know who NOT to trust, check the link
The website looks like all Sunshine and rainbows. Now I'm really curious why they can't be trusted.
Jmho. As a political party you need a platform, as far as I can tell No Labels platform is "can't we all just get along?"
Also their members make up a who's who of keeping actual legislation from happening, starting with Joe Lieberman for removing a single pair option from the ACA. Rumor has it they have courted Kristen Simena and Joe's manchin.
Also Harland Crowe is rumored to be a big funder, as far as I'm concerned these people represent money and nothing else.
That's not even what's happening. It's vampire middlemen setting the prices, which is even worse.
Unfortunately Capitalism by its very nature abhors a free market. Free markets mean more competition, which means less profits. Which is counter to the ideology of capitalism, that being higher profits mean success.
Capitalism is fundamentally unstable and will devolve into monopoly and autocracy if not regulated to prevent it.
You do everything right and still lose it all - our capitalistic system is working exactly the way it is intended.
I hate the US healthcare system so much. So much stress for so many people for so little reason.
There's a reason why literally no developed country in the world is imitating that system. It's broken and it doesn't work for most people.
If only either political party in America agreed...
We're stuck with only a small slice of Dems that even acknowledge our system is fucked.
And you keep going with them or whomever is fighting for the people.
Vote with your heart in the primary, and your brain in the general.
Which is why it sucks so much we don't get primaries every election.
People are literally dying from inaction in America, and we really don't have any say it.
Be careful with that. It was the infighting that kept people home in 2016.
No it wasn’t. It was the DNC cheating at its own game to support Hillary- who was deeply unpopular- that kept people at home.
You can blame other candidates being better all you want. The reality is, Hilary was and Biden is a bad candidate.
"how can Biden be a bad candidate if he won?"
- dnc shills together in unison
we have to move farther right since we lost
🙌
Only voice saying that is in your head.
Sorry but getting more Votes is not defined as cheating. I didn't blame any candidates, I blame the idiots butt hurt for staying home. Add in the "Vote third party to send a message" idiots and you get 2016 in a nutshell. Please note: it wasn't Bernie Voters as they mostly did Vote. But all the "teach Dems a lesson" did was elect Trump. And that is all the fools whining about Biden shall do.
https://observer.com/2016/07/wikileaks-proves-primary-was-rigged-dnc-undermined-democracy/
it wasn't a fair process to begin with, the DNC ran it's primary so as to prevent Bernie from ever getting that election. and they did it because, as a socialist, he's antithetical to the interests that control the DNC. that is, the corporate elite.
they really should just say "fuck it", stop doing primary elections and just appoint whoever they want. It'd be more honest than the dog and pony show we currently have for primaries.
so, you think it is reliable to accept the Russian provided DNC emails at face value? 'cause that is what that wikileaks garbage is. No chance it was modified or edited to push the exact narrative you bought into?
https://www.politifact.com/article/2016/oct/23/are-clinton-wikileaks-emails-doctored-or-are-they-/
"Well, you know Chuck, again these are connected to a Russian government propaganda effort to destabilize the election," Kaine responded.
Kaine later added: "The one (email) that has referred to me was flat-out completely incorrect. So I don’t know whether it was doctored or whether the person sending it didn’t know what they were talking about. Clearly, I think there’s a capacity for much of the information in them to be wrong."
Experts told PolitiFact that there is precedent to support Kaine’s claim. While most of the emails are probably unaltered, they said there is a chance that at least a few have been tampered with in some way.
"I've looked at a lot of document dumps provided by hacker groups over the years, and in almost every case you can find a few altered or entirely falsified documents," said Jeffrey Carr, CEO of cybersecurity firm Taia Global. "But only a few. The vast majority were genuine. I believe that's the case with the Podesta emails, as well."
"I would be shocked if the emails weren't altered," said Jamie Winterton, director of strategy for Arizona State University’s Global Security Initiative, citing Russia’s long history of spreading disinformation.
However, some of the emails in the WikiLeaks dump — especially among emails sent to Podesta — don’t have these signatures and can’t be technically verified. And digital signature verification wouldn’t detect tampering by omission, like if the hackers were to withhold certain emails.
I appreciate that you believe it, but those are at best questionable.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/11/04/no-the-dnc-didnt-rig-the-democratic-primary-for-hillary-clinton/
If the emails are genuine, they're genuine.
If they're not... that's pretty easy to show. Instead, the DNC has apologized for them. But yeah. I'm the one buying a narrative. We also have records of them, you know, doing the things that the emails say they did- like blocking Bernie from accessing voter rolls so he couldn't send mailers or otherwise contact them.
The leak wouldn't have been as impactful if they weren't, you know, actively undermining candidates in contradiction to their own convention's bylaws. But, yes, RuSsIaNs. it's all the rUsSiAnS fault.
Had they shown proof all it would have accomplished is have folks like you claiming the DNC faked them.
And yes, the Russians were behind the stolen emails of both DNC and RNC. Wonder why only the DNC was published by their propaganda front? The Russian source and their support for Mango Mussolini are both well documented. That you are trying to pretend otherwise fairly well condemns your PoV as entire fantasy. Nice try to further muddy the waters, shrub.
you don't offer apologies for remarks that are fake. then, there's that time that an MSNBC straight up accused them of rigging things before the leaks ever happened
or that time that Warren said she believed it was rigged, too
Like, there's plenty of shit there, and yes, there's probably some emails that were altered to make it look worse than it was.
But you're blatantly ignoring a simple fact that they did these things, and that if they had not done these things, it would be pretty simple to demonstrate otherwise. Instead the the leader of the DNC stepped down, and they issued apologies and continued on, fate acompli. The Russians didn't make them cheat. The Russians weren't even the first ones to go there.
all of which comes back to the broader discussion that biden is an objectively bad candidate, but he's the one democrats will put forward, and instead of doing something to attract voters who patently do not like biden, whine and bitch and moan about how it's their voter's fault.
Boomers gonna boom, I guess.
Julian assange is a journalist. I trust him to have done his homework.
He is a self promoting opportunist and was actively fighting to avoid deportation to the US. He is at best a biased useful tool for disseminating propaganda.
And no, he is in no way a journalist.
Julian Paul Assange is an Australian computer programmer, editor, publisher, and activist who founded WikiLeaks in 2006.
The "idiots" who voted third party went 3:1 for the Libertarian party. The Greens got 1% of the vote, and I'll bet a good portion of those would have picked Trump if forced to pick one or the other.
It's not third party voters, it's voters who stay home. If you think you can berate people into showing up for a shitty candidate, then you are delusional.
No it wasn't, it was trying to force Hillary Clinton down our throats.
She won the primary, but spent all her money in the primary and did almost zero opposition research on trump.
Because Hillary Clinton is remarkably unpopular, she has zero charisma. A life time in politics and her only elected office was a completely safe Blue Senate seat for a state she never lived in after essentially an uncontested primary.
The party put all our eggs in a basket with a giant hole in the bottom, because she spent decades stacking up political favors and called them all in.
Bernie could have pulled off an Obama, but the party learned their lesson the last time voters overruled the party. That's why they switched to the strategy and actual legal defense of "it's my party and I'll influence the results if I want".
I don't know how accurate your analysis is, but it affirms my bias so I like the story you tell.
None of that is accurate, but you believe it because you bought into the whining bull shit from 2016.
Bullshit. It was apathy tangential to despair. Infighting happens in the tiny percentage of voters who are actually engaged in and educated about the political system. They don't stay home on election day. It's the average apolitical Americans who looked at Hillary and saw no point in dragging themselves to the polls. The whole "infighting" thing was just a way for the establishment to shift the blame.
I am tired of this. Is anyone actually working on solutions or are we just going to complain?
What would it take to setup a low cost health care clinic and hospital that is covering it's marginal costs?
There is a current movement called Direct Primary Care, where you sign up to a binding agreement to pay a continuing monthly subscription fee that covers your office visits, and your labs and prescriptions are also discounted. So it's possible. And it sounds absolutely fantastic upfront.
But the problem there is that places that do not accept insurance and/or Medicaid and Medicare are also not governed by HIPAA and other state and federal healthcare laws, something most people don't even know until they find out the hard way. I have a relative who thought DPC was the best thing since sliced bread until she found out that all the strange tests she kept being told she needed were not actually for her, and she was actually being submitted to various clinical trials without her knowledge and against her directly expressed wishes, for symptoms and diseases she's never even had.
So now she's paying for a monthly DPC subscription she can't use because she's afraid of them and refuses to go back. They won't even give her her medical records (not surprising, because that practice is all a clinical trial fraud scam so they'd be a work of fiction anyway). And she doesn't have a lot of money to start with; she can go to an urgent care place if she needs something immediate, I suppose.
But if you break a DPC agreement, you have to pay full value for every office visit you ever had, every non-billable service under the agreement, and it gets added up against the monthly subscription fees you've been paying. These agreements are written so as to be difficult to break (pick one and look for the following "Termination" language):
So yeah, DPC is great in theory, as long as in practice it's not just a front end for some other medical scam, because they lack oversight and are exempt from all the consumer protections built into insurance-oriented laws like HIPAA. There is no recourse with these non-insurance places, because insurance laws are also pretty much the only consumer protection laws with teeth that exist in the doctor-patient relationship, and very few states have any legislative experience with, much less written law, in regard to Direct Primary Care. We're trying to find an attorney that knows enough about it to be able to assist, but even that's a challenge.
I don't know if fraud was the primary intention of Direct Primary Care, but because of the way it is structured it absolutely attracts the bottom feeders of medical practice who want to pull in otherwise underserved (uninsured, poor, undocumented) patients for some kind of economic exploitation.
That story is pretty horrific.
Yeah, and it's still ongoing. She can leave and get hit with an as-yet-unknown fee/bill, or she can stay and not have her own needs addressed but be pressured into carrying on underwriting her own clinical trial eligibility tests.
She's terrified of setting foot in there now because when she started to argue she'd never had [whatever] and didn't need these tests they got really aggressive. Not physical, just verbally hard hitting, like abruptly changing the subject and then coming back around to it two minutes later to insist she needs this, and doing that over and over again, ignoring or twisting anything she tried to say in reply, and this was at the end of a day long fast for blood tests. There's more, just petty shit like you'd expect from a high-pressure con, but that's the kind of thing.
Fortunately the tests she was objecting to were not common, and she has an in-law who is retired from medicine, so when she asked him what was going on and named the tests they wanted he was able to cotton on pretty quickly and at least tell her it had nothing to do with her or her own needs.
But the only red flag up front was that they have ZERO local reviews. None. They have pay-to-play awards like "best in town" in a local newspaper, and NOTHING else anywhere. That was odd. Now we know why.
I don't see how this ends well. She'll either pay some fat bill or end up in court, none of which has anything to do with the healthcare she signed up for. I wrote all this so that maybe someone thinking about DPC will think twice before they sign up.
Thank you for sharing this story. Things can only change is the abuses are shared with many people.
I am sorry she is going through this.
Thank you. I don't mind saying it's scary as hell.
That really sounds like some dystopian science fiction novel. But I guess that's true for a lot of things going on in the US right now.
Funny you should say that. When she first told me what was going on, my mind immediately went back to that Robin Cook novel Coma from the 70s, lol.
Probably a justice system where you can't be sued for 150 bajilion for every time someone slips on wet floor. And where health insurance does not expect you to give them 95% discount because every other hospital does. Among other things.
I don't know. How would you get around malpractice insurance and deal with the competition that has economy of scale?
Malpractice insurance is not infinitely expensive.
As for economies of scale, there are not a lot of them. One doctor and one patient.
Ok it isn't bloody free either. What do you mean there is not a lot of them? Have you been to any clinic the past 30 years? Look at all the gear they got. What about medications? They aren't going to be able to buy in bulk. It feels like every single doc I have met in my life tried at least once to go into private practice and struggled.
But hey if these are easy to defeat problems I am all for someone doing it. Open up a clinic and run it at cost and donations. Take no insurance and somehow find a way.
Malpractice insurance accounts for about 2.4% of overall healthcare costs in the US. Meanwhile, healthcare costs are going up at around 4% a year. So, let's assume malpractice never really happens (ha) and we can entirely eliminate that cost by outlawing malpractice suits completely. Great, we just solved half a year of healthcare inflation.
Do you know what "marginal cost" means?
Edit: that was more aggressive than is helpful.
Marginal costs capture the costs for helping one more patient, so most of the issues presented are handled. Fix costs cover the cost of equipment that can be reused without additional costs. Fixed costs can be paid for with "one time" money like grants and donations.
do what everyone else is doing
vote biden he promises to fix it
It's finally working!!! We're nearly fully incorporated in the profit-machine! I hope the billionaires notice me for a moment so that I can feel like I'm one of them
He looked at me! WITNESS ME!!!
As intended. We are a capitalism. As long as we are, capital shall be God. As long as They who have the most money shall prevail, they who have the most money will prevail.
Capitalism is OK as long as it is regulated. The free market is nearly a myth because of Billionaires.
Here I am. Sitting in a private room with my son at one of the best children's hospitals in the world. 5 therapy sessions a day. And all I have to worry about is food for me and the wife. I used to bug my dad about moving to Canada. Now I thank him.