“The key thing has to be to change the financial incentives in health care,” she says. “Everybody follows the money, and systems behave according to where the incentives are.” Right now, she sees the system encouraging doctors, hospitals, and insurers to think, “Let people get as sick as you can, encourage them to have all sorts of tests that they don’t need and surgeries that they don’t need, and we’ll make money.” Medical schools, she adds, “do not focus on prevention at all, because they’re not paid to prevent anything.”
Fuuuaahhh! Lady, the conservative talking point that doctors are giving patients "all sorts of tests" they don't really need is an attack on preventative medicine for poor people. How TF do you think you make a diagnosis or figure out what's wrong with someone without running tests? Tea leaves? Blood letting?
Consistent and affordable access to healthcare is the difference for the poor and the wealthy. If you can only afford tp go to the doctor once you're already sick then there is no prevention. There is no need to reinvent the wheel, and I'm so sick of pretending we don't know what hospital bills look like in other countries.
We should not be allowing hospitals with CEOs and COOs that have salaries in the millions nonprofit status. Why TF are we doing this?
Or, why not make medical nonprofit status contingent on full acceptance of Medicaid and Medicare? You've got an insane number of administrative positions working in giant hospitals.
Why is a hospital with non profit status able to say "our doctors won't take Medicaid?" (which seems to usually happens bc administration pressures doctors to not accept medicaid bc they know they won't be reimbursed).
Y'all are just making up these numbers for the cost of a hospital visit. Why is nonprofit status not contingent on all those administrative positions figuring out how to make the numbers look like they would in any other developed country so that Medicaid and Medicare won't be leaving things unpaid?
If you just truly can't figure out a way your hospital can accept programs paid for by U.S. tax dollars, maybe you shouldn't be getting a fucking tax exemption for simply running a for profit business?