So then go to a doctor who'll do it for $50.00. Put that ****er out of business.

OH WAIT. YOU CAN'T.

GG GOV'T

E****INGXACTLY.

The regular doctor WOULDN'T DO IT, I had to GO TO THE HOSPITAL.

(For what was considered Emergency surgery)

(I wish I had done this at work. The final total bill for when I broke a tooth at work was like $3000)

Hey guys I don't know if you heard but we are ****ed.

Who wants to start a post apocalypticcc motorcycle gang with green jackets? We can roam the windswept highways marauding and making references from long gone obscure lucas arts computer games. We can buy an RV and switch out driving it and paint it forrest green.

Yeah.

(Ron Paul)

That actually sounds pretty awesome. Except if it's a motorcycle gang, why would we be taking turns driving an RV?

Why are you not petitioning this? That's bull****, appeal to your insurance, that's what they are there for. The general quactitioner should have done the sutures in the first place.

And the emergency surgery? What they are doing is fraud.

I disagree. See, now you're getting into heavy-handed government-issued bureaucracy again. No doctor should be forced to perform a specific procedure. For general-purpose medical treatment, you would (in an ideal system) shop around and find a physician who will do what you want for a price you can both agree on.

For emergencies, this doesn't work, obviously, and a minimal but highly-efficient bureacracy should be left intact to keep hospitals or hospital equivalents from ****ing customers over who are in the precarious position of being brought to an institution they may not have gone to had they been conscious.

Hey Mystic0 thanks for posting those Paul videos, they were interesting.

I don't have the money to deal with legal rape.

My insurance paid for exactly what they're supposed to pay for. (I have a yearly limit, I can give them money to get more per year but I DON'T HAVE MONEY FOR THAT EITHER)

The only thing I can say is that procedures can be very expensive, and people sometimes need to be on chronic maintenance on expensive drugs and treatments. A person with renal failure who needs constant dialysis would be in hell I would imagine. Insurance is there for a reason, to cover costs that can become overwhelming in case the unexpected happens.

I mean, the constant care a diabetic needs for multiple systems, even with reasonable blood sugar control... it would seem to be overwhelming for one person to handle. Cancer treatments are not cheap and you need to be under nigh constant surveillance in many cases for years. It would be a constant drain on your funds. Something strikes me as very not kosher about an insurance free system, although I can't verbalize it as well as I should.

Healthcare could be cheaper, but in some cases you can only make it so much cheaper.



Wait, what? I'm saying that it's the guy's job. Screw government. Rob (from what I can tell) when to a GP first, who then because he sucks and shouldn't be a physician, told him to go to the ER. He's not doing his duty. He is a bad physician, who is not doing his job. It's suturing a damn lip, and it was only four sutures! I can do that.



You are being overcharged. Surely someone must be there to help you when you're getting screwed.

As in the same thing happened to me, and I went and solved it through my insurance. ******* was charging me for a procedure he didn't do.

The problem with making health care a purely capitalistic system is it would require an overhaul of the pharmaceutical patent system as well or absolutely no one out of the top 10% of population would be able to afford most medications.

Don't support Ron Paul. Support RU PAUL!

What sort of changes? It costs a decent to actually get a drug to approval (see here) that may down the may still be recalled when it reaches market (read: Cox-2 inhibitors) because the sample size or the trial time still wasn't long enough.

Also, a decent amount of drugs can fail at any phase of the four trials (btw phase 4 is studying after approval), basically eating up any cost. And this is biology. Strange, unpredictable, bat**** insane reactions can occur at any time in a random group that you can't possibly ever predict. Going through failed drugs, I can only imagine how much cost went into them.

The first reason you're having trouble is deep down you know all aspects of healthcare are overpriced considerably. The second reason you're having trouble is because we already shoulder the costs cancer treatments and chronic illnesses now. So what the hell's the difference? We will simply be shouldering it ourselves instead of allowing everyone and his cat to take a cut of the money. And without government meddling, costs will sink faster than SAJN in the Atlantic with his feet stuck in a block of concrete.

Bwahahahaha!

Oh, I'm aware it costs a ridiculous amount of money to get things through the federal batteries of testing. I meant the whole "sure, keep that patent for far longer than necessary so none of your competitors can produce a clone/similar product anytime soon, so feel free to charge whatever for your product!" thing.

They could be made cheaper, but I don't know enough to know how much of a difference could be made or where those costs are incurred. No offense, but I doubt you do either. If you do, sources.



Wait, who shoulders all the cost? The patient? That... isn't correct currently. I mean, that's what insurance is for. That's why you pay for it, to not have to deal with that sort of expense. I must be misunderstanding you here.



You may be speaking from common sense, but I don't see it happening in that way. Again, I don't know where all the costs come from, only some of them. What I do know still makes healthcare not cheap. In serious situations you have expensive equipment being operated by highly skilled individuals, among other things. I can't ever see it being that cheap. Maybe it can be, but I don't know.



I shoulda figured that's what you meant, heh. Can't disagree at all there.

On a tangent, I hate that they are in charge of naming the drugs. You know what they do? They make the generic's name chul'wa'sholgath'3-benzotrieneketoaldehyde, and their trade name "Scub". I know why they do that (so that years down the line, we're still ordering "scub" in shorthand), but I'm tested on those infernal generic names.

You're shouldering the costs ALL THE TIME even if you're not sick. That's what I mean. There's 1 trillion dollars worth of medical treatments going on and Americans pay 1 trillion dollars to make that happen.

It's not like with insurance companies, that money magically appears for you. No. You continuously pay money for the treatments of other people, and in the long run, you pay more money than you would have out of your pocket unless you are a very sick person.

So basically wealth is taken from the healthy and given to the sick.

A combination of competition and ephemeralization in high technology will cheapen medical procedures considerably just like everything else in the world, ever. But we have to allow it to happen.

I acknowledge this. I'm also fine with it. The reason I'm against universal insurance is that I don't trust our government to currently handle the beast, nor do I believe that everyone should be forced to pay into it if they really don't want to. If everyone wanted healthcare and the government would streamline it perfectly, I'd be head over heels for universal healthcare. But such a world does not exist.



Eventually it will. Eventually, and I don't know when that will be. 200 years maybe? Hell, if anything, high technology has made things more expensive at this current point. People's lives have been extended that uh... well, are pretty much hanging over death's door, by a thread of an ET tube. Medicine is still expanding, I don't know if it's quite at the streamlining point.

Also we may be entering the post antibiotic era. I don't know what implications that has as far as cost, but that is certainly not a good thing. That's a tangent though.

Meh. We'll have nanobots capable of seeking and destroying harmful bacteria by the time we fully enter the post-antibiotic era. They'll sell 'em by the truckload for pennies on the dollar. Be optimistic!

I AM NOT KIDDING YOU BUT THAT SOOO EXCITES ME. I CAN'T FREAKING WAIT FOR THAT.

Yeah, that would be what you're looking for as far as slashing cost. The other possibilities too. Cancers? History. Clogged arteries? Cleared. Invasive surgeries will mostly be a thing of the past. Hospital stays would be clipped drastically. Combined with whenever-the-hell stem cells finally go somewhere in some way shape or form, that would be a glorious time for humanity. A guy had an MI? Boom, inject him with cardiac myocyte generating cells, directed to ischemic areas.

What I can't wait for is this. Can you imagine how such a contraption would change humanity?

But you could have nanobots that are programmed by you to kill the evil invading nanobots... The defense almost always is caught up with the offense..

Of all the stupid things, I just keep thinking how awesome it would be to summon food on demand of any sort, at any time of the night

Anyway, cool stuff.

Or you could order the nano-assembler to make another nano-assembler. :downs:

If you could just put the entire world's production toward making the first nano-assembler all of our problems would be solved forever..

I think some ****** would nano-assemble several nukes complete with ICBMs and fry us all before that happens.

Maybe that's already happened to us or similar intelligent life forms several times... and we're nearing the end of the "cycle"

So that when we pass out because we are all out of shape nerds we can get picked up.

Also, don't we need somewhere to play Monkey Island?

Yeah.

And Full Throttle!

I call leader of said motorcycle gain. Wha-cha!

So far the candidate I'm most impressed with is Bill Richardson. What we need most, I feel, is a diplomat, and Richardson is that (among other things). He recently negotiated a ceasefire in Darfur. On top of that, he's the only democratic candidate with executive experience (governor of New Mexico), he has cabinet and UN experience, not to mention that apparently according to this chart his views match mine almost perfectly. My dream ticket is Richardson - Obama, but that probably won't happen as the party leadership will be reluctant to run two minorities

As far as healthcare, I think the evidence stands for itself: medical bills are the leading cause of bankruptcy in America.
source: http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2005/bankruptcy_study.html

Personally, I would rather be treated by a doctor who became a doctor because he wanted to help people than one who became a doctor because he wanted to make lots of money.

wait what?

There will be no need for fighting in my threads.

Unless you're Rob.

Well then you shouldn't. I don't like the Republican party, or rather what it has become, and the only real reason I joined it was to vote for Ron Paul, even though he won't win.

Um, you don't have to be a member of the party to vote for its candidate.

In the Primaries you do, right?

Depends on the state

Precisely