Angela, insightful and a badass fiberglass car that is ridiculously overpowered, wotta dame!
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Originally Posted by Dueller
Not as big an expense as you would think. Malpractice premiums and settlements/awards amount to less than 1/2 of 1% of total health care costs in this country. FWIW I feel doctors are getting sgrewed by their carriers. Tort reform was enacted in my state limiting non-pecuniary damages to $250K. Insurance industry lobbied hard for it citing a likely decrease in premiums. Guess what...premiums actually went up.
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Lot of truth to this, assuming you are talking about health insurance premiums. Malpractice prices did indeed go down, mine did anyway. Providers are being hosed by third party payors, premiums up, reimbursement down. Can't say as I blame them. If I saw my golden goose was ill, I would want to get as much out of her before she died as I could.
Lot of reasons, fraud and unnecessary procedures are a tiny percentage. The biggest thing, IMHO, is that for decades, Americans have not paid the true cost for healthcare. This leads to the spare no expense mentality. The need to practice defensive medicine is a giant part, lot of cat scans, MRIs. Doctor pay is a relatively small percentage, particularly when you consider the expense of an education. I was a quarter million dollars in debt when I finished my education, not to mention the 10 years I spent not earning much money, opportunity cost matters.
Read an interesting article in the July Bulletin of the American College of Surgeons by R Wenger MD, FACS.
We have high cancer survival rates, better access to care, and a system that attracts patients and doctors from around the world for care and training.
Did you know that American and American based groups have won more Nobel prizes for Medicine and Physiology than the rest of the world combined? This is astounding to me. 8 of the last 10 major medical advances also by Americans or American based groups. He also made strongly supported arguments that life expectancy is not a good indicator of efficiency of system, with the same true of infant mortality rates, this last due to vagaries in the way countries like Canada, England and France report this metric.
In short Markus, there is no simple answer to "why"
here, read the Wenger article yourself, kind of long, but made me question the wisdom of the single payor system even more
http://www.facs.org/fellows_info/bulletin/2009/wenger0709.pdf