A great slide from PNHP's Sickocure.org web site that speaks for itself.
The full slide show is here.
Thursday, August 2, 2007
Physician/Adminstrator "Balance"
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
From BibleGateway.com: The Sheep and The Goats
BibleGateway.com: From Matthew Chapter 25, The Parable of the Sheep and the Goats.:
"41'Then he will say to those on his left, 'Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. 42For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, 43I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.'
44'They also will answer, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?'
45'He will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.'
46'Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.'"
How bad can single payer be that Christians can walk away from this lesson so blithely? What evil in a government sponsored single payer system is so compelling to ignore these charges of Jesus? What principles have been teased and tortured out of Christianity to trump this parable so central to Christ's call for us to take care of each other?
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
I do not think it means what you think it means...
Was Adam Smith really a promoter of greed?
An excellent book chapter giving a more complete picture of Adam Smith's economic and moral philosophy that is not as conservatives would have you believe. Greed is not good. Laissez-Faire is not absolute.
"In reality, as Adam Smith argued, one of the main functions of government, beyond that of securing the order that allows markets to operate effectively, is that of intervening to ensure that the unwarranted excesses of commercial society do not entirely destroy the social order or the moral foundations of behaviour. As we have seen in his arguments regarding the role of publicly funded education in redressing the worst of the degrading and demoralising effects of the division of labour and reducing the possibility of revolutionary protests against an unjust social order, Smith argued that in effect ‘…the visible hand of the state would counteract the potentially stultifying effects of the invisible hand of the market’ "
Martin | Fletcher
Martin Fletcher: It Pays to Be in Healthcare: Leading Recruiting Firm Releases Physician, Nurse & Allied Health Compensation Reports
"Among physicians, Martin, Fletcher evaluated more than 3,500 individuals' salaries across 17 medical specialties. The top five paying specialties are:
Position/Average/Median
Cardiology (invasive)/$460,000/$440,000
Radiology/$425,000/$392,700
Orthopedic/$424,000/$383,000
Gastroenterology/$405,000/$368,000
Urology/$380,000/$325,520
According to Martin, Fletcher research, the lowest paying positions among physician specialties surveyed include: family practitioner, internal medicine, pediatrics and hospitalist, with median salaries ranging from $146,260 to $170,980. The top three incentives used by medical groups to recruit physicians include: production-driven incomes starting year one, buy-in based on A/R and full pension for retirement."
The full report is here.
It's worth keeping an eye on this data as the debate continues...
Monday, July 30, 2007
'Sicko': Heavily Doctored, By Kurt Loder - Movie News Story | MTV Movie News
'Sicko': Heavily Doctored, By Kurt Loder - Movie News Story MTV Movie News: "Jun 29 2007 12:34 PM EDT
'Sicko': Heavily Doctored, By Kurt Loder
Is Michael Moore's prescription worse than the disease?"
I think the chief straw man Loder has thrown up here is that Moore holds up the Canadian, French or British systems as "utopia," to use his word. SICKO showed some of the serious flaws in our system and showed some of the serious benefits to others. That really is the bottom line. I've been following the media coverage closely, interviews with various experts, MM himself in interviews, etc. There are lots of complaints about what he "left out." Well, it's only a two hour movie and I think it is not his job nor his role to be the health care czar and review every nuance of health care here and abroad. He had a lot of points to make and he made them very well, very humorously and sometimes heart-breakingly poignantly. If you see it, you'll know that he didn't tell the downsides of universal access in other countries, but, frankly, as we health care providers know (I'm a critical care physician) better than the average viewer, neither did he scratch the surface of the problems so widespread in our "system." But he always says in interviews that of course other systems have problems. Our goal should be to take the best parts of each of those systems and craft an American system better than all the others. But, he makes no bones that this needs to be a single payer system at its core. He seems to have no bone to pick with physicians - he believes the focus of reform should be getting rid of private health insurance as we know it.
And finally, if you want to make the debate solely on health care horror anecdotes, you'll lose. Badly.
Cheers,
Doing Battle With the Insurance Company in a Fight to Stay Alive - New York Times
Doing Battle With the Insurance Company in a Fight to Stay Alive - New York Times: "Obstacles to Care
Doing Battle With the Insurance Company in a Fight to Stay Alive "
Thank goodness we don't ration care here in the good ol' US of A!
Doctors - Managed Care and Health Insurance - Medicine and Health - Wages and Salaries - New York Times
Doctors - Managed Care and Health Insurance - Medicine and Health - Wages and Salaries - New York Times:
Argues that physician income is a major problem in the US health system crisis, as here:
"Doctors in the United States earn two to three times as much as they do in other industrialized countries. Surveys by medical-practice management groups show that American doctors make an average of $200,000 to $300,000 a year. Primary care doctors and pediatricians make less, between $125,000 and $200,000, but in specialties like radiology, physicians can take home $400,000 or more.
In Europe, however, doctors made $60,000 to $120,000 in 2002, according to a survey sponsored by the British government in 2004."
Interestingly, according to Canadian Statistics, we're not so different.
Click on the link, and the tables reporting what physicians in Canada receive from Canadian Medicare start on page 28. And no, I'm sorry I don't have the data on their overhead, actual take home or hours. If YOU do, send me the link, please!
BTW, I will not argue that there is an unconscionable discrepancy in income among the procedure-based specialties and other physicians in the US.
Cheers!
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