• ThrowawayOnLemmy@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    The doctors being paid properly are hardly what I’d consider a profiteering scam. Attack insurance. Attack billing. The doctors are doing a job.

    • cassetti@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Who do you think writes the medical textbooks handed out to med students? Part of the scam is in the training how and what to prescribe. Many doctors will treat the symptoms while ignoring the cause. A proper healthy diet and exercise could cure a lot of things, but that’s not profitable advice to give.

      I know a woman who spent years fighting a bunch of skin problems and other issues, visiting all kinds of doctors. Finally she figured it out herself. She had turned herself entirely “vegan” for probably a decade or longer, choosing to forgo all meat, especially red meat. Guess what fixed her big issues? Eating a small filet of steak several times a month - her blood type and genetics required something that she was lacking in all her other vitamins/minerals/etc intake. Not saying eating red meat every day is good for the average person either, but just one example where her condition stumped doctors for several years before she chased down a wild theory herself and it worked.

    • Scrof@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      The very same doctors who are getting paid extra for selling specific brands of drugs and treatments? It’s a profiteering scam from top to bottom and the doctors are obviously complicit. “Doing a job” my ass, plenty of unethical things in this world are done by people “just doing their job”, in fact - most of them.

    • btaf45@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      The doctors in the UK are doing the same job, at 1/2 the cost to consumers. The doctors in Germany are doing the same job, at 2/3 the cost to consumers. It’s hard to ignore that the main difference is that the US health care system is a massive profiteering scam throughout the system.

      • bhmnscmm@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Did you finish reading the article? Here’s a quote from it:

        “People have a narrative that physician earnings is one of the main drivers of high health-care costs in the U.S.,” Polyakova told us. “It is kind of hard to support this narrative if ultimately physicians earn less than 10 percent of national health-care expenditures.”

        There is certainly too much money in American heathcare, but doctors are a pretty small part of the problem.

        • CMLVI@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          They didn’t. If you go to the hospital, and are charged $12k for a 3 day stay, $20k for an MRI, and $1.5k for general medicine, Dr’s working for free would reduce your costs from $33.5k to just under $31k.

          This is like having a massive bleed from an artery on your leg, but you put a bandaid on a scrape on your arm instead.

          • sadreality@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            Mostly true although I am not sure if this ratio would hold tho: 33.5k to just under $31k. Labor is never such a small cost of any service fee.

            • CMLVI@kbin.social
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              1 year ago

              That only accounts for physician labor, not other labor involved. Nurses, administrators, other operational labor that isn’t a Dr.

              But the point of contention was Dr salary, not overall labor costs with healthcare, so it shouldn’t necessarily be relevant to this particular conversation. I’m sure there are plenty of people who also take issue with the legion of administrators insurance companies pay to handle visits and services, as well as the number of people hospitals pay to try to claw money out of them as well. They provide nothing to the healthcare service, and exist only to try to keep/gain as much funding as possible. You don’t have less cancer because Tom at BCBS was able to deny the Tylenol they gave you two months ago.

      • surfrock66@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I think the current state of the NHS undercuts that argument; the doctors are underfunded there and services have suffered.