Are Doctors today basically just welfare recipients that put in a little work?

[badvestor]

Medicare isn't the core issue to escalating costs. High cost is due to horrendous diets, price gouging by protected health insurance providers and drug corporations. It can be argued medicare in fact saves money in the long term, making primary care available to many of these people. Avoids more expensive emergency visits.

Core issue is as a nation and as indiviudals We've moved away from the founding principles. When we willingly give up basic rights to corrupt and crazed zealots in govt, it's the beginning of the end. Sub-human Lowlife degenerates have taken over and now hold all the levers of power in every sphere of influence. The moral rot includes the average disinterested lowlife partisan voter who prefers to be pandered to instead of making an effort to learn about the issues and vote for the best man.

 

[Fractals 'R Us]

I worked in the implantables industry. We worked very hard to provide pacemakers with programmability. We provided the programming hardware for free. We provided the training for free. Doctors had the opportunity to make adjustments to every possible facet of the activities of the pacemaker with regard to how it sensed heart activity and how it decided when to produce a pulse to cause a heartbeat, the duration of the pulse, the voltage of the pulse, etc..

90% of the pacers were never programmed. 90% of the time the doctors would charge some big bucks for followup visits and all that and never change the settings of the pacemakers from the nominal settings done at the end of the production line... I always wondered if they were just con artists at heart, were they afraid to change anything based on lawsuit risk, what?

 

[PocketChange]

Doctors practice less medicine and more insurance billing.

 

[walter4]

Quote from BSAM:

Take the profit factor out of health care.
Destroy the USA medical cartel.
We need true national health care.

+1

 

[blackjack007]

Quote from Fractals 'R Us:

I always wondered if they were just con artists at heart, were they afraid to change anything based on lawsuit risk, what?

i'm telling you all, physicians (and dentists) are some of the GREEDIEST mother f*ckers i've ever met. i know a number of them personally.

the general public has a lot of respect for them and that's why they're able to continue fleecing people, but in reality they're as dirty as lawyers and used car salesmen.

doctors and dentists do not go into the field looking to help people. they go into the field looking to help themselves.

 

[macroman]

another out of the bum job.

 

[RewriteQuran]

Why you should not go to medical school
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/abinaz...go-to-medical-school-a-gleefully-biased-rant/

 

[Scataphagos]

Quote from nutmeg:

"... My guess it's probably a loss for a Dr to treat a medicare/medicaid patient unless the Dr needs a tax write off, otherwise the Dr should just go play golf.

My wife is a doc at University hospital, which is also our hospital of the indigent.

When other hospitals get a patient without insurance, they send them to University hospital*... where they're either treated for free (at a loss to the hospital and the doctor) or they get reimbursed between $.18-$.31/$1.00 of the normal billing rate from Medicaid or a "low payer" insurance plan. Her pay is based upon "collections", not "billed". So as you can see.... with lots of work done without reimbursement and lots more reimbursed at/below hard costs... somebody is getting lots of bang for the buck somewhere...

She laments that her salary is below 50 percentile for her specialty... but she's refused job offers at double her salary and higher... feels like she's "giving to the community" when she does pro bono cases. (I both admire her and want to slap the shit out of her at the same time... JK) She also averages 50-60hrs/week and takes call about 8-days a month.


*All hospitals are required to administer treatment if through the ER. Once the patient is stable, they don't have to treat further if the patient has no insurance. They can also refuse to treat a patient whose insurer is one of the "low" payers. University hospital never refuses treatment for anybody, insured or not.

 

[RCG Trader]

Quote from nutmeg:

It would be very interesting to know exactly how much a Dr receive's of a Medicare/medicaid dollar. Like everything else, the bureaucracy probably consumes most of the money.

My guess it's probably a loss for a Dr to treat a medicare/medicaid patient unless the Dr needs a tax write off, otherwise the Dr should just go play golf.

+1

 

[RCG Trader]

Quote from denner:

I've asked this very same question, albeit the path to becoming an MD is stringent enough to garner respect. The massive fraud in medicare/medicaid is probably responsible for a significant portion of "economic growth". Just like all of the other wasteful government spending. Without it, we'd quickly realize that almost every industry is completely dependent upon this sort of thing and all of the cries for "less government interference" really amount to "keep the subsidies flowing, but still continue to privatize my profits and socialize my losses".

denner, I misread you entirely. +1