Cures for an Ailing System

People get the health care they deserve. Some folk don't appear to grasp the economic and financial foundations of the medicine business. That is perplexing, because they are very simple and easy to understand. Health care is extortion -- "Your money or your life." A doctor is a criminal, a member of an organized crime syndicate no government can control. Lawyers may reduce their fees to attract customers, but any doctor who reduces her fees is condemned by all her medical peers as an incompetent, until she has no customers. The very last thing the medicine business can tolerate is competition. They must remain a Mafia, in which every member is sworn to loyalty and the code of silence.

To repeat, no government can control the medicine mafia. We will all need a doctor someday, politicians and senior officials as much as anyone else. No one -- no one -- in any government can breath a word against doctors, or make any attempt to control their rapacious demands for more and more money for less and less work. Someday they will need a doctor, and the mafia never forgets, and never forgives.

The juvenile daydream that we can ever reduce the cost of the medicine mafia is a fairytale fantasy. The medicine business rules, and they will never surrender power. "Your money or your life," forever. Do you want out of this trap? Don't go to a doctor. Chose to die instead. That's your only escape route.

Health care system as a whole need a complete expanse and need to start with the rual hospital and clinics. The hospital I worked as a Laboratory Techinian and as a CNA had substandard equipment and pay. Most equipment and beds were older than I am. Also with the low pay scales, most workers with experinece were either fired or quit because of back work condition, poor leadership and lack of money. I could write a book on the mistakes and the frustration of the poor care and lack of funding for the thousands of rual hospitals.

Health care in the U.S. is beyond crisis. I am ashamed that our presidential candidates can pump millions into campaigns while we have people in our own country dying from lack of proper medical care from not being able to afford the cost. This has touched me personally and the more I look into the situation the uglier it gets. It's all in the name of "greed". No one should be turned away for not having medical insurance and not being able to quality for some type of assistance. The problem is so massive that we may have to start on a local scale to address the problem and work our way up to national. I don't have the answer but am working with many people trying to address the issue.

Stop floating money into space and put it to use solving the drug and health care problem. Viola, end of problem. azlizird

Maybe someone should look at the big pharmaceutical rip-off (ex. all the peopole who take Lipitor don't need it!) and insist that people take more control of their own health instead of expecting the rest of us to take care of them after they have abused their bodies through poor diets, smoking, drinking, and on it goes.

With ???A Big Dose of Skepticism???, ???Rx for Health Care: Pain???, and ???Cures for an Ailing System??? in the issue of December 10, 2007, the editors of Newsweek certainly raised our consciousness on health care. Thank you.

With the exception of the Samuelson judgment call (???Rx for Health Care: Pain???) you have only told me about ???status quo???. ???Status quo???, among other things, is non-competitive and physician-, pharmaceutical, and hospital-centric. We are in a health care crisis. Have I missed something or did ???status quo??? get us into crisis. Do you really expect ???status quo??? to get us out of the crisis? Give us responsibility with a free market and ???freedom of choice???. Give all qualified, trained, and capable health care providers ???freedom of practice???.

To me, ???alternative??? does not mean ???quackery or snake oil??? unless you are brainwashed by ???status quo???. It means ???choice??? that is not ???status quo???. ???A Big Dose of Skepticism??? is a fair assessment of ???quackery and snake oil???, but it unfairly condemns the 2.5 million alternative health care providers who are NOT physicians (i.e., nurses, chiropractors, acupuncturists, physical and massage therapists, nutritionists, naturopaths, mid-wives, behavioral therapists, et al.).

Health care is business and ???Cures for an Ailing System??? just covered ???status quo???. Why didn???t you interview Harvard business professors like Dr. Clayton Christianson (author of the ???Innovator??? series of books) or Dr Regina Herzlinger (author of ???Who Killed Health Care????). ???Status quo??? spends more money (universal coverage) on ???status quo???. When will we spend money smarter? Good luck with problems like diabetes, obesity, and mental health issues, ???status quo???; regretfully, you can???t handle them.

America's crisis of over insurance is much greater that the crisis of uninsurance. In other countries, patients control more health care dollars than insurers or government bureaucrats. In the U.S., only 13 cents of every dollar is paid directly by patients. On the other hand, the notion that we spend less because our employers or the government control the other 87 cents is obviously absurd: we pay for it indirectly through lower wages and higher taxes. Take the money away from the employers and the government and give it back to the patients who need it. This will be done through tax reform: deductions and credits like Rudy Giuliani has proposed.

Dr. Swartz hits the most important points. Her point about coverage for the currently uninsured is the more obvious and the starting point for everything else. That we should have such a large portion of our population uncovered is a national disgrace that should shame politicians who are forever prattling to our self-congratulation about what a great country the US is.

Almost equally important, and less obvious, is that our unique system of relying on employers to finance health coverage, never ideal, has become increasingly unsustainable. We should be starting down the road to weening ourselves from that system, if replacing it with a fairer, wiser, less administratively costly system on the model of Medicare that eliminates both employers and insurers from the chain.

Chuck in Wyoming