Comments

There is surely nothing worth shouting about more than health and healthcare. I hope Tom keeps rattling the healthcare cage. Ironically all the great advances in the last few centuries that have led to improving our health have NOT come from healthcare professionals such as doctors and nurses but from engineers and scientists and environmental factors. These improvements include such things as effective sanitation systems.

Promoting ‘health’ is a far more effective strategy than investing disproportionately highly in healthcare ‘treatment’ but we continue to see far more investment in the more ‘sexy’ treatment end of the health spectrum. Surely it is better to work to prevent our first heart attack than to worry about the costs of treating it once it has happened!

In respect of our environment we sadly continue to take our eye off the ball with increased pollution in the air that we and more importantly, our children and their children breathe.

Posted by Trevor Gay at May 30, 2006 5:08 AM

Tom:

There is a group of physicians who are getting increasingly disillusioned with our medical system.

Like many other organizations in history much of the academic medical establishment has become solely self-perpetuating. Top professors in universities subscribe and enforce a pharmaceutical oriented way to look at health. What is taught in medical schools (after the first few years of basic sciences)is distorted and lopsided. If this way of thinking persists the whole nation will be on some form of drug or the other. And the rare physician who points out 'the emperor has no clothes' is excommunicated and labelled a quack. Dr. Atkins was one of them till public opinion overshadowed the biases of the establishment.

A lot of physicians work in the trenches and get fabulous results treating their patients using science,biochemistry,common sense, and nutritional and lifestyle changes. These physicans are called alternative medical doctors, science based natural medicine doctors, functional medical doctors and of course the famous term 'quacks'.

It will take time for the population to hear about these physicians because to focus attention on themselves often incurs the wrath of the medical board.But if you or a loved one want to stay healthy these are the people to go to.

Posted by Thomas Alexander at May 30, 2006 7:45 PM

Free market libertarians often, rightly, compare health insurance to "grocery insurance," with third party payments creating an incentive to buy as much steak as possible. The problem is that the delivery of service, largely controlled by Big Pharma and the licensed professional cartels, does not allow anything but steak.

The patenting system, a set of state-conferred monopolies which should be anathema to anyone who believes in free market principles, makes some forms of care artificially lucrative. And then the healthcare system gravitates to where the money is. It's a classic example of Ivan Illich's "radical monopoly": thanks to state capitalism, the affordable, human scale stuff is crowded out by the kind of expensive stuff Big Pharma and the licensing cartels want to provide.

We have what amounts to a multiple-tier healthcare finance system, coupled with a one-tier system of service delivery.

I'm a big proponent of reviving the old mutuals or sick benefit societies, organizing healthcare finance on a cooperative model, like the Ithaca Health system. But unless the delivery of service can also be organized on a cooperative basis, and the professional cartels and patent parasites can be reined in, it won't make much difference.

I'd like to see healthcare organized around small, neighborhood clinics for preventive medicine and for basic stuff like infectious diseases and simple trauma like fractures, with federation and pooling of assets to provide higher-tech stuff at small regional centers as needed.

I'd also like to see community hospitals mutualized, turned into the cooperative property of member-patients, with their daily affairs managed by syndicates of their own employees.

There is no reason you should have to hire the services of someone who completed a full course of med school and residency to get the most basic services. Even when you want ground chuck, you have to pay for filet mignon. A Western, free-market version of the Chinese barefoot doctor, with a couple months of intensive schooling, could (say) do a basic sputum culture for pneumonia and prescribe a round of Zithro for it.

A neighborhood clinic might provide cheap, bare bones insurance for only such basic services, and limit itself to generic drugs, unless the member preferred to buy a higher tier of service. I'll bet a lot of uninsured people would jump at the chance for access to the stuff that worked thirty years ago, at the prices of thirty years ago.

Most of the high price of patented medicine isn't for new blockbuster drugs. Most R&D is carried out either to jigger around with formulas just enough to repatent stuff that's about to expire, or to lockdown as many therapeutic windows as possible for the same basic formula so no competitor can offer a rival version. The patent system is a Frankenstein's monster. buy viagra in toronto

Posted by Kevin Carson at May 31, 2006 2:08 PM