When George Lai of Portland, Oregon, took his toddler son to a pediatrician last summer for a checkup, the doctor noticed a little splinter in the child’s palm. “He must have gotten it between the front door and the car,” Lai later recalled, and the child wasn’t complaining. The doctor grabbed a pair of forceps — aka tweezers — and pulled out the splinter in “a second,” Lai said. That brief tug was transformed into a surgical billing code: Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) code 10120, “incision and removal of a foreign body, subcutaneous” — at a cost of $414.
I think the ultimate problem is that it needs a collectivist solution and the people we’ve elected, who would need to architect such a thing, have consistently shown they have no interest in such a thing
Challenges all around though. People talk about “lobbyist money” and that’s certainly a major factor but there’s more to it than that. We have no social safety nets in the us. That’s why when Kamala proposed Medicare for all she proposed a two lane option that still had privatized plans (which would still enable so much administrative waste, but would at least be an incremental improvement in terms of reintroducing compulsory insurance and decoupling insurance from employment).
But to overnight create an actual socialized medicine program akin to the nhs would destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs overnight. It would also eliminate tens of billions of dollars of waste administrative spending and streamline so much stuff that I do, but it would be a nightmare to get political support for because anyone who works in medical billing, who works for Aetna, Cigna, anthem, etc, would see the writing on the wall. Some of their jobs would be recreated in whatever new system was made but the majority would be made redundant. that’s where we go back to the lack of a social safety net piece: the USA has an extremely poor track record here. And it’s not just overpaid ceos making 10 million a year, it’s thousands of administrators, claims adjusters, middle managers, etc, making 40-80k who would be thrown to the wolves
I really appreciate the insightful discussion that you offered in this thread, especially a few comments up where you were (justifiably) annoyed but also still civil.
I live in the UK and a friend who is a doctor told me about when they had a doctor friend from the US visit. My friend joked about how little they get paid when you consider how much unpaid labour they did, and jokingly said “maybe I should move to the US”. Their US friend responded that the impression that healthcare professionals in the US get paid way better is mostly incorrect, especially if we’re comparing to a country with socialised healthcare. They did some number crunching and confirmed that this US doctor would be way better off in the UK