Thinking about dropping Medicare?

I welcome competition from alternative providers. I do not consider traditional medicine any safer than the average quack on the street, in most cases.

However.

It IS the most studied and understood area of “health care” (I don’t consider other modalities health care when they aren’t effective). Thus any and all risks incurred in Western medicine SHOULD be offset by the potential benefits (depending on the individuals making the decisions of course).

Plus, traditional/Western medicine has been “proven” (nothing can be proven but only supported by thousands upon thousands of data points and outcomes) to be effective for treating many diseases and disorders, among them HIV, cancer, diabetes, and traumas of all kinds.

Show me an alternative provider who can do that, and show me randomized double blind placebo controlled trial to go along with it, and I will reassess my opinions.

Anonymous 11:32, you are clueless.

Medicare/HHS supports medical training institutions, for which it receives a lot of low cost but highly-trained labor from residents and interns. Remember, even though these people have not graduated residency training, they have their doctorate degrees and generally several years of intensive experience as hospital physicians. For the government, it is a bargain.

For doctors, working in a residency program is not an option; if you want to practice medicine anywhere, you have to be board eligible, and residency is the only way to get there. Residency training is by a yearly contract. There is no downstream obligation to the trainee to accept Medicare patients when finished with residency; there is no expected moral or required legal obligation to do so, nor is there any compelling argument for making any such requirement. The government is already getting a pretty good deal, and they know it.

I can’t think why earning a salary, or just pay when no “salary” is guaranteed, should confer a right by the government or anyone else to feel entitled to take work of someone else without payment, or for less than the fair value of that work. All that is is confiscation. You, Anon 11:32, seem to want to dress it up as some entitlement on moral grounds. Sorry, but you don’t convince. All you seem to want is the right to take what you just don’t want to pay for. That makes you a wishful thief, but little more.

how about retiring after 20 yrs with full pension & frequent extra payments justified for “disabilities” acquired on the job.

if you want doctors to become like every other gov’t employee sucking resources from those that actually produce something, then fine, make them “public” entities. Then see what kind of quality you’ll get (e.g. VA hospitals)