Re: Higgenbotham's Dark Age Hovel
Posted: Tue Nov 26, 2024 11:34 am
This is amazing stuff. For example,tim wrote: Mon Nov 25, 2024 8:26 am https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/what ... deadly-and
Note: healthcare spending at the beginning of the 20th century was 0.25% of GDP, reached 1% in 1933, dropped to 0.38% during World War II, and went back up to 1% in 1961 before experiencing the meteoric rise it has seen in recent decades.
Most remarkably, despite spending 2-4 times as much on healthcare as any other affluent nation, the United States has the worst healthcare outcomes amongst the affluent nations (which is detailed within these charts). This I would argue, is a result of our healthcare spending prioritizing what corporate interests want, not what produces effective healthcare. Sadly, as I have shown in this article, pervasive corruption has entrenched itself throughout the Department of Health and Human Services and our healthcare officials.
As this costly trend is impossible to ignore, various proposals have been made to address it. Unfortunately, all of them have arisen from the same mentality that gave birth to the problem in the first place and thus have made it worse (e.g., creating more regulation to “improve” healthcare but having that regulation be created by bureaucrats who did not understand the realities of healthcare and shaped by corporate lobbyists who only care about profits).
Even I'm surprised by just how much corruption is described in this link. No wonder life expectancy is plummeting.To illustrate, I recently had a colleague who called me in tears because their father had been discharged to a hospice center, and was being started on palliative care because his case was terminal, but my colleague was convinced he was just dehydrated and needed saline. I asked, “Well you’re a doctor, can’t you get them to give the IV?” They said, “The nurses will only do it with the hospice physician’s authorization, so I need help.” We were eventually able to find a way to get him the IV (which made a big difference) but there was a roughly a four day delay in the process.
To an outsider, that situation seems a bit unbelievable, but in truth, it’s reflective of the current paradigm.