The Cure.

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

THE CURE by David Gratzer, MD

Medicine is the only segment of the national economy where innovations and progress increase costs to the consumer. Compare computers and calculators and DVDs etc.; their prices have decreased significantly since they first appeared on the market.

David Gratzer is a Canadian MD who practices medicine in Canada and America.

THE CURE is an assessment of American medicine and some recommendations for how to fix it. The Canadian system isnt the answer: JUST SAY NO to Canadian Healthcare!

To paraphrase Voltaire: Canadian medicine is entertainment while you wait for Nature to take its course. OUCH! Gratzer warns that Canadian lines for treatment kill people. He knows. He had a medical emergency in Canada but had to flee across the border to an American emergency room for timely help. Canadians patiently languish at their emergency rooms waiting in line for beds. The Canadian system saves money by rationing medical care.

America does the exact opposite. MDs, hospitals, drug companies, etc. bribe the politicans to make expensive treatments mandatory. Your insurance company responds to this robbery by denying treatment or inflating your insurance premium. If youre old or have a chronic medical problem, your employer has a big incentive to get rid of you, because of the insurance costs.

Gratzer lists a variety of factors that contribute to the high cost of medicine in America:

1. On average it takes 17 years for government to approve new treatments and pills.
2. Your MD is lazy and hasnt learned anything new since she got her MD license. Consequently, she's clueless about new meds and practices. What she learned in med school is what you get.
3. The medical industry bribes lawmakers to force you to pay for expensive and unnecessary treatment.
4. Americans insist on running to the MD or ER for any and every bullshit problem. Americans are hypochondriacs. There isnt shit you can do for some problems (like a broken toe) but it costs $1000 to have the ER say "Poor baby!" and send you home with aspirin.
5. Freeloading illegals increase demand and lines for treatment. The hospital has to hire more staff, etc. to care for them, and they dont pay...you do.
6. MDs keep bank hours. Consequently, working people must use expensive ERs after 5PM.
7. Employers like expensive healthcare because its an excuse to limit pay, and they get bigger tax write-offs for health insurance. That is, they pay no Social Security taxes, etc. for healthcare money. Plus you pay most of the premium.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Well, I don't know if it takes 17 years to approve new drugs and treatments anymore. They've streamlined it and a drug can go from discovery to market in 10-12 years. But the threat of major lawsuits makes drug companies very wary of releasing promising treatments without thorough testing. You can hardly blame them. The cost of developing and testing a new drug is astronomical, but still, it's not as much as the drug houses spend on marketing them.

There is a capitalist trap in medicine though, and so it's set up to be a big money game. The treatment of disease is a hell of a lot more profitable than prevention, so we get a lot more R&D into finding cures for diseases rather than vaccines and ways of preventing them. Sick people will pay more to get well than healthy people will pay to stay well, so there's more money to be made in letting them get sick and then treating them.

It's no accident that the major vaccination programs in the history of medicine were run by government health agencies, not private industry. There was no profit to be made from them. Polio, smallpox -- as well as the public hygiene projects that did so much to eradicate typhus and diptheria -- were all public initiatives.

There's always rumors floating around about an anti-tooth decay vaccine that protects against cavities that some big Pharma house is sitting on because it would destroy the dental industry.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

DOC

I dont know. The author says the average time is 17 years from the time a drug is ready for market and the time the FDA approves it. The author faults bureaucratic sloth.

Interestingly, cosmetic surgery attracts the most lawsuits. You cant make ugly disappear.

 

[Selena_Kitt]

1. On average it takes 17 years for government to approve new treatments and pills.

I WISH it took that long! Maybe then we'd actually have some long-term studies about what these drugs actually do to the human body. Instead, we've got Gardasil out there in the biggest rush to market ever, being mandated for teen girls in some states, and some of them have ended up paralyzed from this crap.

This is one area of gov't control I'm not willing to give up.

 

[R. Richard]

I WISH it took that long! Maybe then we'd actually have some long-term studies about what these drugs actually do to the human body. Instead, we've got Gardasil out there in the biggest rush to market ever, being mandated for teen girls in some states, and some of them have ended up paralyzed from this crap.

This is one area of gov't control I'm not willing to give up.

This from the CDC:
Safety of the HPV vaccine
This vaccine has been licensed by the FDA and approved by CDC as safe and effective. It was studied in thousands of females (ages 9 through 26 years) around the world and its safety continues to be monitored by CDC and the FDA. Studies have found no serious side effects. The most common side effect is soreness in the arm (where the shot is given). There have recently been some reports of fainting in teens after they got the vaccine. For this reason, it is recommended that patients wait in their doctor’s office for 15 minutes after getting the vaccine.

Thus, the government thinks that Gardasil is safe and approved its release. However, how they think that a shot in the arm is going to cure a disease of the pussy is beyond my understanding. Maybe the FDA thinks that the pussy is in the arm. [Locally, there are guys so dumb that the think that 'getting a little on the side' means that they have moved it.]

 

[Selena_Kitt]

This from the CDC:
Safety of the HPV vaccine
This vaccine has been licensed by the FDA

Yes, in a world where everything has been "streamlined" and full scale studies are NOT being done!

Vaccine group releases Gardasil reaction report:

The National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC) today released a new analysis of the federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) reports of serious health problems following HPV vaccination (Merck's GARDASIL) during the last six months of 2006. Out of the 385 individual GARDASIL adverse event reports made to VAERS, two-thirds required additional medical care and about one-third of all reports were for children 16-years-old and under, with nearly 25 percent of those children having received simultaneously one or more of the 18 vaccines that Merck did not study in combination with GARDASIL. NVIC is calling on the FDA and CDC to warn parents and doctors that GARDASIL should not be combined with other vaccines and that young girls should be monitored for at least 24 hours for syncopal (collapse/fainting) episodes that can be accompanied by seizure activity, as well as symptoms of tingling, numbness and loss of sensation in the fingers and limbs, all of which should be reported to VAERS immediately.

"Because Merck only studied GARDASIL in fewer than 1200 girls under age 16 in pre-licensure trials, it is critical that doctors and parents be made aware of the nature of the initial adverse event reports coming into VAERS and that they report serious health problems after vaccination when they occur," said NVIC President Barbara Loe Fisher. "There are twice as many children collapsing and four times as many children experiencing tingling, numbness and loss of sensation after getting a GARDASIL vaccination compared to those getting a Tdap (tetanus-diphtheria-acellular pertussis) vaccination. There have been reports of facial paralysis and Guillain-Barre Syndrome. And doctors who give GARDASIL in combination with other vaccines are basically conducting an experiment on their young patients because Merck has not published any safety data for simultaneous vaccination with any vaccine except hepatitis B vaccine."