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and to add to that.....remember our grandparents all had access to doctors and healthcare without needing medicare, medicaid, insurance, etc....and moreover the doctors made house calls.
Pretty much the entire healthcare debacle is caused by too few supply of doctors. The AMA is both the body that certifies doctors and admits them to medical school. Thats fairly unprecedented and doesn't exist for any other profession (the "bar exam" panel doesn't decide who can get into law school).
A person doesn't need to go to school for 7 years and graduate with 4.0 in order to prescribe an antibiotic or determine if you have the flu.
Thats where the supply / demand crunch hits: For all the non-specialist / non-surgeon roles. If there were 10x more doctors for those non-specialist jobs, it would relieve enough burden that healthcare prices could fall.
AMA is a big problem
The other problem is an over reliance on third party payment and the third party is the federal government (Medicare and Medicaid)
Another problem (but relatively minor) is that most people get health insurance from the government or their employer
I realize that this list isn't exhaustive and a rehash of previous arguments
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I understand. There used to be a system where you paid dues to a fraternal organization that bought a doctor’s services for the whole organization’s membership. So, they could all come in and get medical assistance from that doctor when he was there. As somebody also noted, they made house calls and were paid in cash. Yep, the monopoly greed certainly set them up well, didn’t it?
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In areas where people pay cash, a crisis is absent.
For example: plastic surgery, fertility treatments such as IVF, lasik surgery
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Yes, isn’t that strange? Pay as you go in cash medicine is the basis for proper distribution of services. Ain’t economics wunnerful?
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This is an easy one: the plebes have found they can vote themselves goodies from the treasury and take money from the rest of us. Gosh, that wasn’t very difficult! This situation can only obtain with state intervention into the market.
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Just think if the AMA and the Flexner commission hadn’t restricted medical licensing to only their kind of doctor we could still have naturopaths, homeopaths, holistic doctors, and etc. We are being strangled by Rockefeller’s AMA.
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