Quote:
Originally Posted by jay santos
Those are also important issues. I'm not passionate about those issues, but they are very important.
I'm interested in lowering health care costs. Health care costs have grown at triple inflation for the last 10-15 years. That's a big problem.
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So why have health care costs gone up?
Physician salaries have VERY little if anything to do with recent increases in health care costs.
I think the main reasons for increased health care costs result from:
1) New, expensive medications--including biologics (physicians don't get any money for prescribing more expensive medications)
2) Doctors playing defensive medicine (or sometimes lazy medicine)... i.e. doing an MRI either because a patient knows about the high tech stuff and demands it, or because a doctor is afraid of getting sued if he or she doesn't order the MRI, or maybe even the doctor being lazy and sending the patient for an unnecessary procedure. I'd argue that for anything unnecessary, the government could regulate this just as well as an HMO. But this defensive medicine thing doesn't increase physician salaries. I also think HMOs often cut costs by decreasing quality of care or denying a claim unfairly to very ill patients--and that's a very bad thing to do.
3) New, expensive high tech diagnostics (a doctor would only rarely get a cut from these kinds of diagnostics--if theyr'e a part owner of something)
I don't think physician salaries have increased more than inflation....and Medicare and Medicaid compensation have not even kept up with inflation.