Is this that socialist health care system Americans are supposed to want to pay $4 trillion per year for?
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What happens when "health care" is free?
Unlimited demand.
What happens with unlimited demand?
Rationing.
Anybody that ever saw the military healthcare system knows what's up with that. You go to the ER because you ruptured your meniscus and you're sitting there surrounded by 5 dependas with their shitty fat kids because "he coughed once 5 hours ago" because they're too fucking cheap and entitled to go buy Nyquil themselves and want to scam free meds.
These hypochondriac sponges are/were also responsible for the over-prescription of antibiotics, back when doctors would grant requests for them for damn near anything, bacterial infection or not.
I always wondered why MDs would do this. Just to shut patients up? Was there some sort of profit motive?
Definitely multifactorial.
Other considerations are liability and doubt.
Also faster processing times and better patient satisfaction scores (which can influence pay in the US).
Essentially overtreatment never gets sued while undertreatment always gets doubted when a 1 in 1000 outcome happens.
It also takes a lot longer to do a comprehensive assessment and chart documentation to back up your decision to forego treatment then it is to simply skip to the end and hand out boilerplate prescriptions to everyone.
There's also the fact that most routine symptoms that patients present with the most have no useful alternative to offer other than reassurance and time (pink eye, coughs, runny noses, ear aches, rashes, sore throats, nausea/vomiting/diarrhea, abdominal pain, etc).
This reminds me of an anecdote from Louis-Ferdinand Celine, who was an MD.
He was on board a passenger ship when a bunch of people got sick with food poisoning, so he lined them all up and shot a 1/4 grain of morphine into them, reasoning "no matter what's wrong with them, they'll feel better immediately." They all puked their guts out on deck.
Thanks for the very informative reply.
Especially with unlimited immigration from people who never paid into the system and never will, but are more than happy to take advantage of it.
And which group of all has the single biggest demand? Fat people - unironically. We need a "fat markup" for fatties in our public healthcare system.
If you want to tax the fat for their self-inflicted diseases burdening the system, you'd need to include all so-called "lifestyle diseases" in this category--smokers who get cancer or emphysema, users of street drugs who develop lesions and blood borne diseases, chronic alcoholics whose organs fail, malnourished vegans and macrobiotic dieters, people who get the clap or AIDS or monkeypox, type-2 diabetics, etc.
For that time, only the biggest and broadest group (fatties). In many parts of the world obesity is the most common pre-condition when it comes to hospital admissions for entire ranges of diseases and health problems. Force these people into healthier lifestyles and the entire public health system could provide less waiting time, including for more critical treatment. For more specific stuff like smokers there are already massive taxes for cigarettes in many countries (for example almost 70% tobacco tax in germany) - but that money does not flow into the public health system.
"only attack the things I don't participate in"
Man not to be a fatty defender, but somehow I knew you were going to be this type of little bitch.
Little cunts like you that do just as much destructive shit always want to make excuses for why it's different when YOU do it.
You sound like a fucking female.
How? By charging them more for doctoring? That seems like it would be fair.