Health Care

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Maybe this should just be a collection of unorganized rants for awhile?

What is Health Care?

Before delving into the best way to provide healthcare we must define what healthcare is. Health Care is often times conflated with Health Insurance, but these are not the same thing. This is similar to saying that all maintenance on a car is car insurance, which is obviously silly. Health Care is far more than just insurance. Health Care is the maintenance for your body. This means the provision of healthcare is not the same as the provision of health insurance, it is so much more than that.

What is Broken

But we have the best possible medical care! We're Americans! We're Exceptional! If anything we have too much of a free market in health care!

Well, no.

Medical boards severely and unnecessarily restrict... often everything: who can provide medical care, where these people can be trained, what they're allowed to do to help you.

Oncology is a strong candidate for the poster child here: do something unorthodox and save the patient and you can expect to lose your licence. Go through the book by rote and kill every patient you have and you're an upstanding member of the medical community.

There are so many things that don't need doctorate level training, and the all-knowing physician is a lie: it is no longer humanly possible to keep up with advances, too many things are excluded in medical schools, and medical schools can often rigidly stamp out people with what could be considered an anti-patient bias.

Got a disease that your physician doesn't understand? Expect either a wastebasket diagnosis or worse, be classified as a psychological patient. If it isn't A, B, C, or D, you bust me perfectly healthy.

Physicians are often manipulated by drug companies who are struggling to make as much money as possible on fraudulently but extremely expensively tested drugs before their patents expire, even or perhaps especially when the drug company -- who's been fined multiple times for felony-level offenses -- knows that the drug is going to kill more patients than it will save.

Mary Ruwart discovered a promising drug in the 1970s. It never made it to market as it wasn't going to be possible no get past the FDA in time to recover the expenses of testing it.

It many ways we have the worst of everything when it comes to new medications:

• The FDA prevents people the new drug might save or at least significantly help for years or even decades.
• The testing is severe, preventing smaller companies from getting the drug approved unless they get gobbled up by a psychopathic monstrosity
• Once the drug is approved, caveat emptor: you have no idea how dangerous it is because all that time wasting expensive testing has actually been rendered worthless.