On Wed, 26 Jan 2000, Harry Pollard wrote:
> Every year a bunch of US cardiac specialists went to the Soviet Union and
> for two weeks, they would work solidly in a Moscow hospital doing, I
> suppose, triage as they took patients from the multitude to operate and
> save lives. I remember one comment from a US doctor. He couldn't believe
> that the Head of Cardiology at the Moscow hospital got a salary of $7 a
> week - about the same as a bus driver. A sure way to attract the best
> people into medicine.
Harry obviously said this last sentence in jest, but it's actually true:
Giving doctors a small salary will attract the best people into medicine --
those who become doctors to help and heal people, instead of those who are
"in it for the money" (as in the West). The still-increasing excesses of
the medical-industrial complex in the West illustrate quite "well" that
public health and profit-making is rather *inversely* related...
Chris
To quote from an earlier posting on this list:
>
> Report Says Profit-Making Health Plans Damage Care
>
> July 14, 1999
> WASHINGTON -- Patients enrolled in profit-making health insurance plans
> are significantly less likely to receive the basics of good medical care --
> including childhood immunizations, routine mammograms, pap smears,
> prenatal care, and lifesaving drugs after a heart attack -- than
> those in not-for-profit plans, says a new study that concludes that the
> free market is "compromising the quality of care."
> The research, conducted by a team from Harvard University and Public
> Citizen, an advocacy group in Washington, is the first comprehensive
> comparison of investor-owned and nonprofit plans. The authors found that
> on every one of 14 quality-of-care indicators, the for-profits scored worse.
> "The market is destroying our health care system," Dr. David U. Himmelstein,
> associate professor of medicine at Harvard University Medical School
[...]
