Health mess continued

The health care debate has nothing to do with health care, but everything to do with money. Mostly, it deals with insurance coverage. It does nothing about the quality of health care and very little about the accessibility of health care. It doesn't address the problems with our pharmaceutical industry or with the FDA or with the shortage of medical professionals, or with any of a myriad of other health issues, except abortion and euthanasia, which aren't about health care, but religious and moral issues instead (we are not going there on this post).

I have seen many instances where the medical treatment offered was not the best available for the situation, but was instead based on how much money the practitioners would make. The bigger the size of the organization, the worse this seems to be, in general. I have however seen a fair number of cases where they practitioner is a small operation and they still push everything based on what is best for their finances rather then what is best for the patient.

I have had people tell me that the answer to this situation is insurance, but I believe it is just the opposite. I think that the insurance industry is the primary cause of this greed. Sure, there would be the small time medical scam operators that push their patients into something that either they don't need, or that is the most costly of the viable alternatives, but for the most part, before our insurance industry did their takeover of the health care system, practitioners did seem more concerned with the actual health and well-being of their patients.

Part of the problem is that the insurance industry has been making health care choices for all of us. The doctors don't really get the choice of the best treatments, just the choice of the best treatments the insurance covers. The patents don't get informed of their options, cause usually there is only one covered option. It no longer is about the best care for the situation, but about what the coverage is for the situation.

There are lots of examples where offshore clinics have far better care at a much lower cost, using much more advanced techniques. We don't have those options here, because even if the techniques are approved by our almost non-function governmental agencies, the insurance plans don't allow those treatments. They say they are trying to save us money. I have a hard time believing it. I have seen a system wide case where the US health care industry continues to do thallium treadmill tests to gauge arterial blockage, when other tests exist that are more than twice as effective, cost less than a fifth and often less than a tenth of the cost of the thallium test, and are usually up to five times faster. I say system wide because I have seen it happen to multiple people, in multiple states, in multiple hospital systems.

I have also seen and heard of many instances where the doctors (the good ones) pull people aside to a corner and whisper that what they recommend is some kind of do it yourself homeopathic or over the counter treatment, but that they have to issue this prescription or that. I even had one doctor explain that they have a quota that they have to meet in prescription writing in order to keep their license. I don't know the validity of this claim, nor the mechanism it would work by, but just the very mentality of the industry pressuring doctors to always prescribe the latest drugs in the maximum of situations leaves me thinking that the whole thing is just another corrupt system of greed.

We need some kind of impartial informing diagnosis web based system, perhaps not to be required use for doctors, but freely available so individuals can at least see what their options are and to get a non-biased second opinion. Sure, such a system would not be able to write prescriptions, nor would it recommend courses of treatment, but it could show possible diagnoses with all the known courses of treatment and what forms those treatments take. It could even show experimental treatments and list locations where different treatments are available. It could also show how reliable various treatments are shown to be. To put this together would require the input of many people, but if it were built correctly, it would be a learning system. Therefore, it's diagnoses would increase in accuracy over time. I can even picture it being a valuable resource to doctors, regardless of their expertise, experience, and training.