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This is [Patch Adams](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patch_Adams). The guy that Robin Williams portrayed in the self titled [movie](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0129290/)
>In another interview, Adams clarified that he did not dislike Williams, saying, "I think Robin himself is compassionate, generous and funny. I like to think that that's who I am, and so I think he was the only actor I wanted to play me, and I think he did a fabulous job."
Seems his hatred is overblown.
Several years ago, I was at an event where he spoke at my college. It seemed he was more upset that the studio didn’t follow through on donating a portion of the film’s profits to the Gesundheit! Institute. Or it was something similar to that. While he was critical of how they portrayed real events, that didn’t seem to bother him as much as his charity work not getting any financial support from the movie.
I think you're right, my favorite quote from his wiki article has to do with that.
>Patch Adams also said of Robin Williams in an interview, "He made $21 million for four months of pretending to be me, in a very simplistic version, and did not give $10 to my free hospital.Patch Adams, the person, would have, if I had Robin's money, given all $21 million to a free hospital in a country where 80 million cannot get care."
He still disliked the movie, the way I read it. He just doesn't blame Robin Williams for it.
It's also possible they simply talked about it over the years.
Of this I was aware, I however left that information out so that another well informed colleague such as yourself may share in a harvest of karma which as is equal in quantity as it is to the quality of information !
So I know Patch personally and he’s an incredible soul. I’ve never met anyone else that has such a fun and comfortable presence.
We need more doctors like him. We need more *people* like him. Doctors and people that just altruistically care about each other.
When you graduate medical school you become an MD/DO, but during residency is when you become board certified in your chosen field. You can’t really practice medicine in the US without a board certification
You can do whatever you want without board certification as long as someone hires you or you hang your own shingle. Board certification is an academic distinction that you’ve met the requirements of your board. It doesn’t affect your legal obligations to practice in the field you’ve completed training in.
Source: double board certified MD
War has always been about profit. Nobody ever invaded another country just to have a good time. Just go up the hierarchy and sooner or later you will find the people who reap the profits.
Gotta make that dough for tanks and rockets from somewhere, taking it from the ill who have to go to the hospital and later pay up or they die works the best.
But they don’t take the profits and pay more in taxes to pay for anything except CEO pay and stock buy backs and other fancy magic to increase share price each quarter. Best they can do is lower staff head count so they can save extra money so they can pay the other executives and administrators more money which decreases their tax burden also.
Late stage capitalism disagrees. All supply and demand relationships (physical, material, emotional, spiritual, etc.) are profit extraction opportunities. It's just business. /s
I'm being extremely sarcastic in my pervious comment. Both have their upsides. I've lived in both places for extended periods. I can go on about what's so great about both but I'm not going to. I'll just say do your own research and don't listen to the news stations that spew propaganda.
You mean the healthcare that is being deliberately defunded and sabotaged by right wing goons hijacking the government to destroy it from within? Also, the same healthcare that has saved countless lives and continues to do so in spite of disgusting capitalist swine trying to kill people for profit?
I work for a private practice and think about this often. But this is what America has chose. The real scoundrels are insurance companies, medical device companies, and pharmaceutical companies.
> They still choose their actions.
Not really. The Board is legally *required* to make decisions in the best interest of their shareholders (financially).
So it's still policy.
It’s a chicken and egg situation because at this point they are looping around each other. Bad policy enables (incentivizes) people to do this shit, people do this shit and make disgusting amounts of money, and then lobby to further deregulate and privatize industries that really ought to be public.
I’ve worked in roles in medical device with visibility to finances and budgets. The particular Fortune 500 company has 5-8% of its budget for R&D. So while you are correct, they are still insanely greedy and hike prices for no reason
No it wouldn't, most medical advances are made through government funding or by small independent research facilities at schools with government funding. Large pharmaceuticals make almost no advances. The flu vaccine for example was sold to the US Government for $1 because the researchers felt everyone should have access to it. EpiPen fell in the same category, even the modern COVID vaccine was made with tax payer funding.
It is simply not profitable for a corporation to invest millions in research and development for something that may not pay off. The larger the company the more it cost to do less due to sheer size, they have to pay everyone. Meanwhile a small team of 3~10 students working on their PhD in their university is borderline free labor as they are working towards their loans. You can have 100 universities with 5 students researching, that's 500 people with different ideas not bound by the same corporate culture or you can have 200 people in a single company with the same thought process but 200x the expense.
Corporations buy out patents that's why there is something called "Patent Trolling" where companies literally sit around with a bunch of accountants and their sole purpose is to file and buy random patents to prevent others from doing things. Most of the time what they'll do is find a new patent and file for the "right to distribute" of said patent, this prevents the person who discovered [ X ] from selling their own discovery.
No it's not and especially not in the US. Heather Bresch for example increased her compensation from $2.4mil to $18.9mil and claimed the need to increase the cost of the EpiPen from $100 to $600 was for the sake of the company and development of the drug.
https://archive.nytimes.com/well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/08/22/epipen-price-rise-sparks-concern-for-allergy-sufferers/
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/mylan-execs-gave-themselves-raises-they-hiked-epipen-prices-n636591
The EpiPen was invented by Sheldon Kapland in Maryland, USA and died a nobody.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130201055705/http://www.tampabay.com/news/humaninterest/epipen-inventor-helped-millions-and-died-in-obscurity/1038756
Merck KGaA later acquired the exclusive right to distribute the EpiPen in 1998 and has held onto that right since. They spent nothing to develop it.
So I will say again, corporations will NOT spend "10s of billions on research" that's literally not financially beneficial and would prevent them from paying shareholders as it is a guarantee loss of profits.
Martin Shkreli is another famous example of a CEO that bought distribution rights to jack up prices.
I call bullshit. Humans invented before IP law existed, they will invent if it was abolished.
The National Labs show that government funded R&D works. You wouldn't have Internet or GPS without it.
I mean, he's not wrong. As someone in Healthcare it's a fucked up system (US speaking). That being said no one is ever sent away. You will be provided for. The costs can be outrageous even with insurance. Thank you, corporate greed.
If America ever implemented universal Healthcare, and reworked the system to where it wasn't stupidly overpriced. The Healthcare system would have years of congestion from all the people finally seeing a doctor for things they should have seen a doctor for.
That's very true, unfortunately. We've got UHC in Europe and the waiting times for specialists are in years sometimes.
It's still far from ideal, with doctors taking patients privately, but this means a direct connection at least. Without a middle man in the form of billion dollar insurance company focused on profits, preying on human suffering.
It'll never be good, but it can be less bad.
The fun part is when you wait years because you can't pay, but when you finally do save up enough to see a specialist, the specialist strings you along and doesn't give you any answers and you're out of money again.
In Poland we have free medical healthcare but you can choose to go privately. It's good to have an option in case of a long waiting period. Also even when you go privately it's not as expensive as buying a car. As you said, it's not ideal but the system works and at least you're not afraid to call an ambulance
Part of the problem is also the artificial shortage of medical professionals, the board of medicine sets strict standards on how many people can be accepted into medical school to keep the field “ competitive “
Self interest. Restricting the training of new doctors ensures that doctor compensation will be maintained or rise. I get it to some degree, a friend of mine is about to become a radiologist making ~400k and I wouldnt go through what he went through to make even that much, so I can kind of understand why they would oppose policies that would reduce their earning potential. At the same time it's really stupid that they artificially create an extreme burden that then justifies them making the burden worse and worse over time, all to the detriment of patient care.
It's actually not just self interest. If you overtrain numbers and crash the salaries of doctors - well doing an extremely competitive and expensive post graduate degree and slaving away at a residency starts looking a lot less appealing and people will stop doing it.
Then you don't have more doctors anymore - you actually could end up with *less*.
Keeping salaries suitably high is actually very important.
This is a ridiculous claim. If more people trained to be doctors salaries would decrease and overtime fewer people would train to be doctors, but there would be an equilibrium point. If fewer people were training salaries would increase again and so on. The fact that the current supply of doctors needs to be artificially limited by congressional limits on residency shows that the equilibrium point would be at a larger supply of doctors than we have now.
I also think there is a whole other conversation to have about how unnecessarily burdensome the whole process of training to become a doctor is right now. So even if salaries would be dropping, we could still maintain recruitment by making the process of becoming a doctor more focused on preparing people to be good healthcare providers and less focused on having to prove themselves or with maximizing the labor value hospitals can extract from students, interns and residents.
And it would be a good thing. I think most people would rather wait a few months to get checked up / treated, than to wait years to go get checked up / treated because the potential cost is too frightful to think about.
Places that have had free healthcare for awhile are already congested. No matter what the system is overburdened and needs completely reworked.
But a lot of people still go to the ER for anything in the US with or without insurance.
No he is saying under the current system people are likely to wait out treatment because they don’t have the money so they end up waiting until the problem almost kills them. If money was kot an issue you would probably have a lot of people actually getting treatment for things they ignored for years.
While I agree that hospitals that operate for profit are a problem in society, these stories about critical patients that come in and are immediately asked about insurance are almost always bullshit. I’ve worked in an emergency department for six years and any patient that comes in is always guaranteed treatment by law despite ability to pay. It’s literally a law that no one gets turned away in the US
His story would have been more likely to be true in the early 70s when he graduated med school. At that time patients died because they didn't have insurance or didn't have the right insurance and were turned away from the hospital. Indigent care laws didn't come around until the mid 80's.
Shame that it took until 1986 to enact those laws, and a further shame that it's legal to saddle those people with crippling debt after the fact. Stories pre-EMTALA are horrendously true.
Of course, they can still say that the patient is non-critical to dodge their obligations. How can one argue with a medical professional over something like that?
I'm a nurse and perhaps the most traumatizing thing about my career is the number of people I've sent to hospice (end of life care) whom had treatable conditions, but could not afford it. I met their families. I held their hands as they cried. They could have been saved but were essentially sent to die. Sometimes I lose sleep over it.
This makes me vehemently angry at this system.
My grandfather passed recently and there's nearly nothing worse than feeling helpless for a suffering loved one.
My dad has been in and out of the hospital since he was hit by a car five years ago. I always hear from the billing/insurance department before I hear from a doctor or nurse.
The EMTALA act helped with this crap. No ER can turn away a patient if they are in an emergency situation. Any patient that comes to an ER in the US is supposed to go through triage, medically stabilized, and transfered if need be. Any woman in labor is to be transported to L&D and be allowed to safely deliver her baby. No matter what. Any public hospital or ER that denies people of this right is subject to government and private litigation.
Business is not bad , but humanity must always come first. Even from business sense a healthy human is a great repeat customer. The author makes a sweeping and fallacious generalisation that the unfortunate situation he saw represents all of medical science. One should also google Arrow on healthcare economics for a better and more nuanced view on the subject
We've seen before that healthcare investments dont really align consistently with health outcomes. Healthy people come back for business, but the ideal customers are healthy people who stay on repeat medicines and treatments for a long time. Why should we cure diseases we can expensively treat for the rest of your life?
Spot on and sad!!! I have medical insurance and I just paid $150 for 6 weeks of insulin and used a coupon. I shouldn't have to need a coupon for my meds with insurance
Take a look at the typical medical symbol of US, then look at the rest of the world, and you will see the truth behind the US medical system, its blatant.
This is why my mom has a concierge doctor and another personalized doctor. Unfortunately, it is costly, and that is a sin in and of itself, but they focus specifically on the root of your issues.
They are not like normal doctors looking to prescribe a quick fix in the form of a pill. They look into your family medical history, they test for all sorts of things you wouldn’t normally do, they’re available almost any time. Again, the cost is highly preventative for most people, but at least these doctors seem to care, as opposed to doctors who do exactly what medical school taught them to a t.
I’ve sat in a room with someone while the doctor literally said, let me look up the treatment in the system. Oh, it says to do this.
I was like, really? This person is suicidal. They want a psychiatry referral and instead you looked it up on your version of doctor Google?
I get the doctor Google thing for veterinary techs since it's an animal and all the different breeds you can have, but I feel like they should actually know a lot of solutions and have studied them and give a shit rather than just go through the cog motions.
A lot of society is slowly turning into cogs in machines. Dunno if COVID or technology over reliance just exacerbated it or what.
It’s funny, because my mom’s doctors tell her to Google everything, do your own research. Then they ask her to present it to them, and they either agree, refute, or investigate what she has brought them. It’s super collaborative. They realize she’s incredibly invested in her health, and she is actively trying to do everything she can to sustain.
The fact that people don't consider public health the same as fire or police protection is astounding....
Of course elective treatments are quite different (like fire coating or private security) but the health of citizens is the government's responsibility as long as we pay taxes.
And this opinion is from an American, yes....
Looking at the quality of the footage, this was probably some time ago, when it was probably better than what it is now. Now, it is a silly game of big corporations buying up facility just to artificially inflate the price to sell 5 or 6 years down the line. Rinse and repeat. Customers and providers are all at the mercy of the corporate administrators. In some ways, you have to be a seasoned criminal to run the healthcare system.
Medicine is the basic need of humans in their life for survival, and day by day it is increasing, the failure rate of the medicine business is rare nowadays and the margins are high, in this type of business people don't try to bargain.
I do believe doctors and medical professionals should make a good living, but there are good reasons why medicine doesn't fit well into most free market models. The virtues of the free market depend on consumers having the power of choice between competing goods and services. If you don't have that freedom of choice, you don't have a free market.
In cases of emergencies, patients often simply have no choice at all, because their life and limb are at stake, they are under duress and they can't choose the most economically efficient care for themselves, they can only take what is available at that instant. The free market is not able to reward the best services in this case, it can only reward the one that was lucky enough for you to get sick or injured close to them.
Even in non-emergency cases though, it isn't much better. Doctors and hospitals often charge you simply to talk to them and get a consultation. If you are well-off this may not seem like a big deal, but for many middle and lower class families, this severely limits their options. In retail stores, you're typically free to come and go as you please, browsing the goods they offer and to compare them to competitor's offerings if you care to. But now imagine if retail stores made you pay $50-$75 just to walk in the door. You'd do a lot less shopping around, that's for sure, and again, the free market has trouble rewarding the best services, because the patient isn't able to actually find the best service for them.
And this before you even consider the notion of private insurance, a company that's profit is entirely dependent on NOT paying medical expenses...and for some reason we think this is the best way to cover our medical expenses? Shouldn't insurance at least be a non-profit organization so their CEO's can't line their pockets with money from medical care they denied us?
I’ve worked in healthcare my whole life and am a conservative republican. I’ve always proclaimed loudly that healthcare should not be tied to the stock market and trying to make a profit (Same with housing)
The dividing line there is the difficulty with this. What makes a certain level of care elective or not? Should we deny cosmetic surgeries to burn victims? Should we deny gender affirming surgeries? How much imaging/testing should individuals be allowed to ask for before we stop considering it preventive and it becomes elective?
Okay but you're skirting the question here. If you go out and you ask people to categorize medical services based on whether they are necessary or not you will get different answers based on who you talk to. If you have institutions which will be responsible for paying for things only if they get classified as "necessary" they will have a vested interest in making sure as little as possible is considered necessary. The point is that as a criterion a person feeling "I need to do this" is too vague to actually be operable in a legal and financial context.
Edit: like if you say necessary is "you'll die if you dont get this treatment" you exclude a huge amount of medicine currently considered necessary, including all preventative medicine.
Well, it wouldn't be free, as in absolutely no money, it would be "free" as in "your taxes pay for it".
And no raising taxes for it. There's plenty of it going around already if governments stopped spending it stupidly and poorly.
In a roundabout way, thats how it already works. Hospital are legally required to render lifesaving care. If the person can't pay the cost gets eaten up by government subsidies and upcharges to the paying costumers
Yeah and then stuff that would have been elective and preventative is now a life threatening emergency because someone couldn't get the elective or preventative care they truly needed.
But your hot take is a great place to start.
Hotter take, abortion shouldn't be illegal when the mother's life is in jeopardy, but here we are.
Why should a critical condition have to wait until it's an emergency presentation to attract needed care?
The line between "elective" and "emergency" procedures can be a blurry one. For instance, let's take Caesareans. It's an "emergency" Caesarean if you're in labour, but "elective" if you're not, even if you will 100% need one once labour commences (e.g. pre-eclampsia, frank breech, placenta previa etc). If a woman is known to be at risk and will need a Caesarean, why should she not get a planned one if the situation dictates? Why must she be in an emergency to get the same intervention she will need anyway?
Between medicine as a business, homelessness, and billionaires it really feels like we're not humans yet. We're in a transitional phase between monkey and human. Only after we stop fighting over who has the most bananas can we evolve.
Nailing it on the head. It's like a large portion of people just didn't mature all the way through. Like they never had to go through any hardships of helplessness.
As someone who works in a non profit hospital overrun with drug addicts, pill seekers, alcoholics, etc, to the point where people who ACTUALLY need help have no available rooms and have to wait out in the waiting room, I totally understand the necessity for profit run hospitals. Now before you all downvote me, I OBVIOUSLY want a system where people who need help can get it no questions asked. Of course. But the bleeding hearts on Reddit are SEVERELY uneducated on what is really going on in some of these hospitals. These drug seekers are coming to the hospital for drugs and free food LITERALLY every single day and there’s nothing anyone can do about it except give them exactly what they want because the entire defensive medical practice system in the US is flawed beyond repair and will continue to get worse. There are two sides to every coin here. And keep in mind, this is happening in the millions. Not 3 or 4 regular abusers. I’m talking 20-30 drug seekers DAILY. That’s MORE than half the beds in a medium sized ER. This is a real problem that for profit hospitals do not have to deal with quite as much.
Why I love my country who gives it for free. Some long waiting times sometimes, but it's free. You can also pay to go private also to avoid those wait times which I get with work. Movies like JohnQ make me think the American way is so so ridiculous. To Americans for and against, was Obama care really that bad of an idea ?
Even in Canada where we have “free healthcare” or treatment is often horrendous. Native Americans are denied services, have died in waiting rooms, and mocked by staff. They have also been sterilized without their knowledge even up until 2012.
Then there’s my experience. Being white in a white hospital and still refused service. I was literally lying on the floor in excruciating pain and unable to move because of my appendix was about to rupture.
The nurses literally told me that they can’t help me up, and that I have to do it myself. (I’m not overweight, I’m quite skinny actually, so anybody could’ve helped me easily).
Four police officers even walked by laughing at me and refusing to help. The nurse kept asking me what my health number was and told me to register before they could help me. I could barely talk between the moans and excruciating pain.
Oh and our free healthcare isn’t free. Much of the expensive stuff is paid for of course. But we still have to pay for ambulance, x-rays, tests, casts, and many other things that most people would assume are included.
There is nothing inherently wrong with medicine being for-profit. Even single payer systems in some European countries have for-profit medicine. We have for-profit food, housing, water, vehicles, clothing, etc. We live in a society with scarcity. As nice as it would be for everyone to get every medicine and every treatment completely a totally free it is just not reality. Even in single payer countries there a limits to what is covered. For-Profit is simply one way to allocate scarcity and it comes with many benefits and many drawbacks.
One free clinic helps a few people. Changing a broken system helps more if not all people.
Apart from the fact that, in addition to his health policy advocacy work, Patch Adams has already done *a lot* of unpaid work as a doctor.
Healthcare is 18% of all the money we spend. It has to be a business in some respects.
We however should focus on a few things we are not at the moment.
Making it cheaper
(let more people become doctors and more systems provide medical services, this means less regulation and no more ever increasing safety standards, medicine will not be perfectly safe anytime soon but it's already really safe. We are spending so much money on liability concerns)
Making it more available (universal insurance would be pretty great and reduce costs)
Making it more advanced (300-400 billion in medical R&D. If the US gets Universal Healthcare medical R&D plummets like a rock, our expensive healthcare funds the 300-500 R&D expenditure every year.)
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However, only a very small majority. Less than 60%, if I remember correctly.
Enough to be relevant, but probably far too little to change the prevailing circumstances (from which very influential people make a lot of money).
/u/John_Rain, thank you for your submission. Unfortunately, it has been removed for violating the following rule(s): [](#start_removal)* Rule 1 - All content must show something that is objectively interesting as fuck. Just because you find something IAF doesn't mean anyone else will. It's impossible to define everything that could be considered IAF, but for a general idea browse the [top posts of all time](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/top/?t=all) from this subreddit. For more information check [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/wiki/index#wiki_rule_1_-_posts_must_be_interesting_as_fuck). * Rule 1 - No content that isn't INTERESTING AS FUCK. [](#end_removal) For information regarding this and similar issues please see the [rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/wiki/index). If you have any questions, please feel free to [message the moderators via modmail.](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/interestingasfuck&subject=Question%20regarding%20the%20removal%20of%20this%20submission%20by%20/u/John_Rain&message=I%20have%20a%20question%20regarding%20the%20removal%20of%20this%20%5Bsubmission%2E%5D%28https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1dejnnl/-/%3Fcontext%3D10%29)
This is [Patch Adams](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patch_Adams). The guy that Robin Williams portrayed in the self titled [movie](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0129290/)
Patch Adams hates that movie as it grossly misrepresented him and his colleagues.
>In another interview, Adams clarified that he did not dislike Williams, saying, "I think Robin himself is compassionate, generous and funny. I like to think that that's who I am, and so I think he was the only actor I wanted to play me, and I think he did a fabulous job." Seems his hatred is overblown.
Several years ago, I was at an event where he spoke at my college. It seemed he was more upset that the studio didn’t follow through on donating a portion of the film’s profits to the Gesundheit! Institute. Or it was something similar to that. While he was critical of how they portrayed real events, that didn’t seem to bother him as much as his charity work not getting any financial support from the movie.
I think you're right, my favorite quote from his wiki article has to do with that. >Patch Adams also said of Robin Williams in an interview, "He made $21 million for four months of pretending to be me, in a very simplistic version, and did not give $10 to my free hospital.Patch Adams, the person, would have, if I had Robin's money, given all $21 million to a free hospital in a country where 80 million cannot get care."
He still disliked the movie, the way I read it. He just doesn't blame Robin Williams for it. It's also possible they simply talked about it over the years.
Of this I was aware, I however left that information out so that another well informed colleague such as yourself may share in a harvest of karma which as is equal in quantity as it is to the quality of information !
So I know Patch personally and he’s an incredible soul. I’ve never met anyone else that has such a fun and comfortable presence. We need more doctors like him. We need more *people* like him. Doctors and people that just altruistically care about each other.
I like the separation for people and doctors like they're not people anymore.
They're held to a higher standard. The doctor that takes his oathes seriously is above mere humans
eww plz stop idealizing us. we’re just humans with overpriced educations. also stop assuming we’re all men. what year is it?
Admirable, yes. Above me? I disagree.
🧐
I don’t know what you just said but, I like it and agree!
I told them that I said happy stuff and people liked it.
Patch Adams ia a terrible move.
He should be in charge of WHO
That is one wild looking individual. The gesundheit institute is even wilder
Confusing. In the speech above says he dropped out of med school. In the wiki clearly says he finished and graduated med. school. Which one is it??
He said he dropped out of residency, not medical school. You start residency after completing medical school.
Does that mean he isn’t a licensed doctor then? Just curious, not sure how that all works.
They are usually license to train when they enter residency, so they are technically licensed.
When you graduate medical school you become an MD/DO, but during residency is when you become board certified in your chosen field. You can’t really practice medicine in the US without a board certification
You can do whatever you want without board certification as long as someone hires you or you hang your own shingle. Board certification is an academic distinction that you’ve met the requirements of your board. It doesn’t affect your legal obligations to practice in the field you’ve completed training in. Source: double board certified MD
The science says you have to be triple board certified to contribute in this discussion.
Bored certified at this point
You have earned it!
Licensed but not specialized yet. Residencies and Fellowships are for that. They’re still MD’s
An MD is the academic qualification - professional registration and licensing is a whole separate thing.
yeah but most docs get licensed after intern year. one doesn’t have to complete a whole residency to have a license.
where i can vote for him?
I hope that he was one of the people that helped to make EMTALA law.
[удалено]
The subtitles, yeah.
Healthcare Policing Infrastructure These should never be for-profit industries.
Prisons
Education
Water
shelter
War
War has always been about profit. Nobody ever invaded another country just to have a good time. Just go up the hierarchy and sooner or later you will find the people who reap the profits.
Gotta make that dough for tanks and rockets from somewhere, taking it from the ill who have to go to the hospital and later pay up or they die works the best.
But they don’t take the profits and pay more in taxes to pay for anything except CEO pay and stock buy backs and other fancy magic to increase share price each quarter. Best they can do is lower staff head count so they can save extra money so they can pay the other executives and administrators more money which decreases their tax burden also.
What about food, water, housing, education, energy, and transportation? Are we good with that?
Late stage capitalism disagrees. All supply and demand relationships (physical, material, emotional, spiritual, etc.) are profit extraction opportunities. It's just business. /s
Anything where human suffering is involved. Perhaps eventually we could even get to general suffering.
As a person who lives in a third world country with this mentally. I couldn't disagree more.
Politics
Also Food, Shelter, culture, Education, Electricity Everything should be free /s
/S You're starting to sound a like a Communist....
And proud Either you want everyone to have their basic needs met and power in their community, or you're a capitalist
I'm being extremely sarcastic in my pervious comment. Both have their upsides. I've lived in both places for extended periods. I can go on about what's so great about both but I'm not going to. I'll just say do your own research and don't listen to the news stations that spew propaganda.
But it's 'Muricah bruther, land of the pure capitalism. Nobody cares about your morals at the top, only Benjamin Franklin matters.
Also Food, Shelter, culture, Education, Electricity Everything should be free /s
Also Food, Shelter, culture, Education, Electricity Everything should be free /s
Also Food, Shelter, culture, Education, Electricity Everything should be free /s
Why not food and housing as well?
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I wasn't aware we had to recreate someone else's system and weren't allowed to improve anything
You think the US system is an improvement over Canada?
You mean the healthcare that is being deliberately defunded and sabotaged by right wing goons hijacking the government to destroy it from within? Also, the same healthcare that has saved countless lives and continues to do so in spite of disgusting capitalist swine trying to kill people for profit?
those subtitles are also a crime.
1 word subtitle for fuck sake stop this it is torturing my eyes
I work for a private practice and think about this often. But this is what America has chose. The real scoundrels are insurance companies, medical device companies, and pharmaceutical companies.
Respectfully, no. These companies are a byproduct of poor policy.
Which they spend a fuckton of money to lobby for.
Because policy allows them to
They still choose their actions.
> They still choose their actions. Not really. The Board is legally *required* to make decisions in the best interest of their shareholders (financially). So it's still policy.
It’s a chicken and egg situation because at this point they are looping around each other. Bad policy enables (incentivizes) people to do this shit, people do this shit and make disgusting amounts of money, and then lobby to further deregulate and privatize industries that really ought to be public.
A product of a system that's functioning as intended, to produce profit.
Careful. You're not allowed to disparage pharmaceutical cartels around here. You might be accused of wrongthink.
Outlaw medical patents
This would, without a doubt, slow down medical advancement. I'm not saying that nothing should change, but this isn't the answer.
Agreed. People seem to forget the exorbitant cost of R&D.
I’ve worked in roles in medical device with visibility to finances and budgets. The particular Fortune 500 company has 5-8% of its budget for R&D. So while you are correct, they are still insanely greedy and hike prices for no reason
No it wouldn't, most medical advances are made through government funding or by small independent research facilities at schools with government funding. Large pharmaceuticals make almost no advances. The flu vaccine for example was sold to the US Government for $1 because the researchers felt everyone should have access to it. EpiPen fell in the same category, even the modern COVID vaccine was made with tax payer funding. It is simply not profitable for a corporation to invest millions in research and development for something that may not pay off. The larger the company the more it cost to do less due to sheer size, they have to pay everyone. Meanwhile a small team of 3~10 students working on their PhD in their university is borderline free labor as they are working towards their loans. You can have 100 universities with 5 students researching, that's 500 people with different ideas not bound by the same corporate culture or you can have 200 people in a single company with the same thought process but 200x the expense. Corporations buy out patents that's why there is something called "Patent Trolling" where companies literally sit around with a bunch of accountants and their sole purpose is to file and buy random patents to prevent others from doing things. Most of the time what they'll do is find a new patent and file for the "right to distribute" of said patent, this prevents the person who discovered [ X ] from selling their own discovery.
Literally 10s of billions are spent every year by medical corporations in R&D
No it's not and especially not in the US. Heather Bresch for example increased her compensation from $2.4mil to $18.9mil and claimed the need to increase the cost of the EpiPen from $100 to $600 was for the sake of the company and development of the drug. https://archive.nytimes.com/well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/08/22/epipen-price-rise-sparks-concern-for-allergy-sufferers/ https://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/mylan-execs-gave-themselves-raises-they-hiked-epipen-prices-n636591 The EpiPen was invented by Sheldon Kapland in Maryland, USA and died a nobody. https://web.archive.org/web/20130201055705/http://www.tampabay.com/news/humaninterest/epipen-inventor-helped-millions-and-died-in-obscurity/1038756 Merck KGaA later acquired the exclusive right to distribute the EpiPen in 1998 and has held onto that right since. They spent nothing to develop it. So I will say again, corporations will NOT spend "10s of billions on research" that's literally not financially beneficial and would prevent them from paying shareholders as it is a guarantee loss of profits. Martin Shkreli is another famous example of a CEO that bought distribution rights to jack up prices.
I call bullshit. Humans invented before IP law existed, they will invent if it was abolished. The National Labs show that government funded R&D works. You wouldn't have Internet or GPS without it.
Holy shit that's not an illegal thing already??
No. The stockholders and ceo of every medical company should be blindfolded and shot.
I mean, he's not wrong. As someone in Healthcare it's a fucked up system (US speaking). That being said no one is ever sent away. You will be provided for. The costs can be outrageous even with insurance. Thank you, corporate greed.
I seriously can't read these damn one word at a time subtitles. Who reads like that!?
If America ever implemented universal Healthcare, and reworked the system to where it wasn't stupidly overpriced. The Healthcare system would have years of congestion from all the people finally seeing a doctor for things they should have seen a doctor for.
That's very true, unfortunately. We've got UHC in Europe and the waiting times for specialists are in years sometimes. It's still far from ideal, with doctors taking patients privately, but this means a direct connection at least. Without a middle man in the form of billion dollar insurance company focused on profits, preying on human suffering. It'll never be good, but it can be less bad.
As an American I have waited years to see a specialist for lack of ability to pay. And when I finally did see them I still had to pay out of pocket.
The fun part is when you wait years because you can't pay, but when you finally do save up enough to see a specialist, the specialist strings you along and doesn't give you any answers and you're out of money again.
In Poland we have free medical healthcare but you can choose to go privately. It's good to have an option in case of a long waiting period. Also even when you go privately it's not as expensive as buying a car. As you said, it's not ideal but the system works and at least you're not afraid to call an ambulance
Part of the problem is also the artificial shortage of medical professionals, the board of medicine sets strict standards on how many people can be accepted into medical school to keep the field “ competitive “
How does the artificial competition even benefit them?
Self interest. Restricting the training of new doctors ensures that doctor compensation will be maintained or rise. I get it to some degree, a friend of mine is about to become a radiologist making ~400k and I wouldnt go through what he went through to make even that much, so I can kind of understand why they would oppose policies that would reduce their earning potential. At the same time it's really stupid that they artificially create an extreme burden that then justifies them making the burden worse and worse over time, all to the detriment of patient care.
It's actually not just self interest. If you overtrain numbers and crash the salaries of doctors - well doing an extremely competitive and expensive post graduate degree and slaving away at a residency starts looking a lot less appealing and people will stop doing it. Then you don't have more doctors anymore - you actually could end up with *less*. Keeping salaries suitably high is actually very important.
This is a ridiculous claim. If more people trained to be doctors salaries would decrease and overtime fewer people would train to be doctors, but there would be an equilibrium point. If fewer people were training salaries would increase again and so on. The fact that the current supply of doctors needs to be artificially limited by congressional limits on residency shows that the equilibrium point would be at a larger supply of doctors than we have now. I also think there is a whole other conversation to have about how unnecessarily burdensome the whole process of training to become a doctor is right now. So even if salaries would be dropping, we could still maintain recruitment by making the process of becoming a doctor more focused on preparing people to be good healthcare providers and less focused on having to prove themselves or with maximizing the labor value hospitals can extract from students, interns and residents.
Wages go up
And it would be a good thing. I think most people would rather wait a few months to get checked up / treated, than to wait years to go get checked up / treated because the potential cost is too frightful to think about.
Places that have had free healthcare for awhile are already congested. No matter what the system is overburdened and needs completely reworked. But a lot of people still go to the ER for anything in the US with or without insurance.
Hell yea, I love going to the ER with no insurance. Not getting a bill has been life saving
I'm sorry, is your reasoning why we shouldn't do it is because people would finally use it? I seriously hope that's not what you're saying.
No he is saying under the current system people are likely to wait out treatment because they don’t have the money so they end up waiting until the problem almost kills them. If money was kot an issue you would probably have a lot of people actually getting treatment for things they ignored for years.
Doesn't sound like, and I don't agree that's what they were saying.
I think you're the only person in the thread thick enough to have misread it that way.
While I agree that hospitals that operate for profit are a problem in society, these stories about critical patients that come in and are immediately asked about insurance are almost always bullshit. I’ve worked in an emergency department for six years and any patient that comes in is always guaranteed treatment by law despite ability to pay. It’s literally a law that no one gets turned away in the US
His story would have been more likely to be true in the early 70s when he graduated med school. At that time patients died because they didn't have insurance or didn't have the right insurance and were turned away from the hospital. Indigent care laws didn't come around until the mid 80's.
Shame that it took until 1986 to enact those laws, and a further shame that it's legal to saddle those people with crippling debt after the fact. Stories pre-EMTALA are horrendously true. Of course, they can still say that the patient is non-critical to dodge their obligations. How can one argue with a medical professional over something like that?
> Shane that it took until 1986 to enact those laws Fucking Shane......always dragging his feet
I'm a nurse and perhaps the most traumatizing thing about my career is the number of people I've sent to hospice (end of life care) whom had treatable conditions, but could not afford it. I met their families. I held their hands as they cried. They could have been saved but were essentially sent to die. Sometimes I lose sleep over it.
This makes me vehemently angry at this system. My grandfather passed recently and there's nearly nothing worse than feeling helpless for a suffering loved one.
Have you considered emigrating?
What are some of the treatable conditions they died from?
My dad has been in and out of the hospital since he was hit by a car five years ago. I always hear from the billing/insurance department before I hear from a doctor or nurse.
The EMTALA act helped with this crap. No ER can turn away a patient if they are in an emergency situation. Any patient that comes to an ER in the US is supposed to go through triage, medically stabilized, and transfered if need be. Any woman in labor is to be transported to L&D and be allowed to safely deliver her baby. No matter what. Any public hospital or ER that denies people of this right is subject to government and private litigation.
You don't ask a person in that situation if you have insurance. It is against EMTALA.
Business is not bad , but humanity must always come first. Even from business sense a healthy human is a great repeat customer. The author makes a sweeping and fallacious generalisation that the unfortunate situation he saw represents all of medical science. One should also google Arrow on healthcare economics for a better and more nuanced view on the subject
We've seen before that healthcare investments dont really align consistently with health outcomes. Healthy people come back for business, but the ideal customers are healthy people who stay on repeat medicines and treatments for a long time. Why should we cure diseases we can expensively treat for the rest of your life?
Got to meet him personally. (Made a delivery to him) Nicest guy you could hope to meet.
Spot on and sad!!! I have medical insurance and I just paid $150 for 6 weeks of insulin and used a coupon. I shouldn't have to need a coupon for my meds with insurance
Scary thing to think I could get sick and absolutely ruin my family. Thinking about it keeps me up at night.
Take a look at the typical medical symbol of US, then look at the rest of the world, and you will see the truth behind the US medical system, its blatant.
Fucking A right.
This is why my mom has a concierge doctor and another personalized doctor. Unfortunately, it is costly, and that is a sin in and of itself, but they focus specifically on the root of your issues. They are not like normal doctors looking to prescribe a quick fix in the form of a pill. They look into your family medical history, they test for all sorts of things you wouldn’t normally do, they’re available almost any time. Again, the cost is highly preventative for most people, but at least these doctors seem to care, as opposed to doctors who do exactly what medical school taught them to a t.
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I’ve sat in a room with someone while the doctor literally said, let me look up the treatment in the system. Oh, it says to do this. I was like, really? This person is suicidal. They want a psychiatry referral and instead you looked it up on your version of doctor Google?
I get the doctor Google thing for veterinary techs since it's an animal and all the different breeds you can have, but I feel like they should actually know a lot of solutions and have studied them and give a shit rather than just go through the cog motions. A lot of society is slowly turning into cogs in machines. Dunno if COVID or technology over reliance just exacerbated it or what.
It’s funny, because my mom’s doctors tell her to Google everything, do your own research. Then they ask her to present it to them, and they either agree, refute, or investigate what she has brought them. It’s super collaborative. They realize she’s incredibly invested in her health, and she is actively trying to do everything she can to sustain.
Well. America is full of self serving socially inept greedy men and the largest concentration of those men is in government
That's what my father always says, he's a doctor, he worked for free more than he worked for money.
Americans need to do two things and we'll have it: Medicare for All Overturn Citizen's United
Pfizer.
The fact that people don't consider public health the same as fire or police protection is astounding.... Of course elective treatments are quite different (like fire coating or private security) but the health of citizens is the government's responsibility as long as we pay taxes. And this opinion is from an American, yes....
Looking at the quality of the footage, this was probably some time ago, when it was probably better than what it is now. Now, it is a silly game of big corporations buying up facility just to artificially inflate the price to sell 5 or 6 years down the line. Rinse and repeat. Customers and providers are all at the mercy of the corporate administrators. In some ways, you have to be a seasoned criminal to run the healthcare system.
foods and medicines mustn't be taxed it's coercive, taxes don't feed or cure anything.
It will take a revolution to change it in America.
Was that Dr. Red Duke?
Medicine is the basic need of humans in their life for survival, and day by day it is increasing, the failure rate of the medicine business is rare nowadays and the margins are high, in this type of business people don't try to bargain.
Be careful, bro don’t let the pharmaceutical people find you
I do believe doctors and medical professionals should make a good living, but there are good reasons why medicine doesn't fit well into most free market models. The virtues of the free market depend on consumers having the power of choice between competing goods and services. If you don't have that freedom of choice, you don't have a free market. In cases of emergencies, patients often simply have no choice at all, because their life and limb are at stake, they are under duress and they can't choose the most economically efficient care for themselves, they can only take what is available at that instant. The free market is not able to reward the best services in this case, it can only reward the one that was lucky enough for you to get sick or injured close to them. Even in non-emergency cases though, it isn't much better. Doctors and hospitals often charge you simply to talk to them and get a consultation. If you are well-off this may not seem like a big deal, but for many middle and lower class families, this severely limits their options. In retail stores, you're typically free to come and go as you please, browsing the goods they offer and to compare them to competitor's offerings if you care to. But now imagine if retail stores made you pay $50-$75 just to walk in the door. You'd do a lot less shopping around, that's for sure, and again, the free market has trouble rewarding the best services, because the patient isn't able to actually find the best service for them. And this before you even consider the notion of private insurance, a company that's profit is entirely dependent on NOT paying medical expenses...and for some reason we think this is the best way to cover our medical expenses? Shouldn't insurance at least be a non-profit organization so their CEO's can't line their pockets with money from medical care they denied us?
Food, shelter and healthcare should all be freely supplied by society to any who need it. When you lift from the bottom you raise everyone.
"This is America"
I’ve worked in healthcare my whole life and am a conservative republican. I’ve always proclaimed loudly that healthcare should not be tied to the stock market and trying to make a profit (Same with housing)
My hot take: Is it an emergency? It's free. Is it elective? It's paid.
The dividing line there is the difficulty with this. What makes a certain level of care elective or not? Should we deny cosmetic surgeries to burn victims? Should we deny gender affirming surgeries? How much imaging/testing should individuals be allowed to ask for before we stop considering it preventive and it becomes elective?
Question 1: elective is "I want to do this" and not "I need to do this" Question 2: see answer 1 Question 3: see answer 1 Question 4: see answer 1
Okay but you're skirting the question here. If you go out and you ask people to categorize medical services based on whether they are necessary or not you will get different answers based on who you talk to. If you have institutions which will be responsible for paying for things only if they get classified as "necessary" they will have a vested interest in making sure as little as possible is considered necessary. The point is that as a criterion a person feeling "I need to do this" is too vague to actually be operable in a legal and financial context. Edit: like if you say necessary is "you'll die if you dont get this treatment" you exclude a huge amount of medicine currently considered necessary, including all preventative medicine.
You can need something and not have it be an emergency. How do you define need?
I get the sentiment, it seems noble, but doctors can’t work for free. And there aren’t enough elective surgeries to fund the necessary ones.
Well, it wouldn't be free, as in absolutely no money, it would be "free" as in "your taxes pay for it". And no raising taxes for it. There's plenty of it going around already if governments stopped spending it stupidly and poorly.
In a roundabout way, thats how it already works. Hospital are legally required to render lifesaving care. If the person can't pay the cost gets eaten up by government subsidies and upcharges to the paying costumers
Yeah that’s exactly the problem, government will never spend your taxes appropriately. It’s a nice thought, but not realistically going to happen.
Socialised medicine is cheaper than for profit. Single player is cheaper than the US system.
Sadly, I know
Yeah and then stuff that would have been elective and preventative is now a life threatening emergency because someone couldn't get the elective or preventative care they truly needed. But your hot take is a great place to start. Hotter take, abortion shouldn't be illegal when the mother's life is in jeopardy, but here we are.
Why should a critical condition have to wait until it's an emergency presentation to attract needed care? The line between "elective" and "emergency" procedures can be a blurry one. For instance, let's take Caesareans. It's an "emergency" Caesarean if you're in labour, but "elective" if you're not, even if you will 100% need one once labour commences (e.g. pre-eclampsia, frank breech, placenta previa etc). If a woman is known to be at risk and will need a Caesarean, why should she not get a planned one if the situation dictates? Why must she be in an emergency to get the same intervention she will need anyway?
Funnily enough complex problems don't have simple solutions.
Why has he got that facial hair though?
In nursing school now & I have to say this is what I hate the most & was not expecting going into this.
Between medicine as a business, homelessness, and billionaires it really feels like we're not humans yet. We're in a transitional phase between monkey and human. Only after we stop fighting over who has the most bananas can we evolve.
Nailing it on the head. It's like a large portion of people just didn't mature all the way through. Like they never had to go through any hardships of helplessness.
It is immoral and unethical.
I'm all for removing professional licencing so people like Patch Adams can practice cheap medicine
This is a horrible takeaway.
His words say, “I’m a serious man,” but the mustache tells you he’s not afraid to get a little kooky sometimes.
But, but don’t you believe in the free market?!
As someone who works in a non profit hospital overrun with drug addicts, pill seekers, alcoholics, etc, to the point where people who ACTUALLY need help have no available rooms and have to wait out in the waiting room, I totally understand the necessity for profit run hospitals. Now before you all downvote me, I OBVIOUSLY want a system where people who need help can get it no questions asked. Of course. But the bleeding hearts on Reddit are SEVERELY uneducated on what is really going on in some of these hospitals. These drug seekers are coming to the hospital for drugs and free food LITERALLY every single day and there’s nothing anyone can do about it except give them exactly what they want because the entire defensive medical practice system in the US is flawed beyond repair and will continue to get worse. There are two sides to every coin here. And keep in mind, this is happening in the millions. Not 3 or 4 regular abusers. I’m talking 20-30 drug seekers DAILY. That’s MORE than half the beds in a medium sized ER. This is a real problem that for profit hospitals do not have to deal with quite as much.
Why I love my country who gives it for free. Some long waiting times sometimes, but it's free. You can also pay to go private also to avoid those wait times which I get with work. Movies like JohnQ make me think the American way is so so ridiculous. To Americans for and against, was Obama care really that bad of an idea ?
But when will this happen in reality, all hospitals, all doctors, all insurance companies, all pharmas companies, have made it into business...
Sad but true. Health is not a good someone should have to buy.
Most of the world understands this
That's why I quit!
Also Food, Shelter, culture, Education, Electricity Everything should be free /s
Scary moustache - good man 😁
Even in Canada where we have “free healthcare” or treatment is often horrendous. Native Americans are denied services, have died in waiting rooms, and mocked by staff. They have also been sterilized without their knowledge even up until 2012. Then there’s my experience. Being white in a white hospital and still refused service. I was literally lying on the floor in excruciating pain and unable to move because of my appendix was about to rupture. The nurses literally told me that they can’t help me up, and that I have to do it myself. (I’m not overweight, I’m quite skinny actually, so anybody could’ve helped me easily). Four police officers even walked by laughing at me and refusing to help. The nurse kept asking me what my health number was and told me to register before they could help me. I could barely talk between the moans and excruciating pain. Oh and our free healthcare isn’t free. Much of the expensive stuff is paid for of course. But we still have to pay for ambulance, x-rays, tests, casts, and many other things that most people would assume are included.
There is nothing inherently wrong with medicine being for-profit. Even single payer systems in some European countries have for-profit medicine. We have for-profit food, housing, water, vehicles, clothing, etc. We live in a society with scarcity. As nice as it would be for everyone to get every medicine and every treatment completely a totally free it is just not reality. Even in single payer countries there a limits to what is covered. For-Profit is simply one way to allocate scarcity and it comes with many benefits and many drawbacks.
He could've graduated then run a free clinic instead of going on the lecture circuit saying it should be free.
One free clinic helps a few people. Changing a broken system helps more if not all people. Apart from the fact that, in addition to his health policy advocacy work, Patch Adams has already done *a lot* of unpaid work as a doctor.
Healthcare is 18% of all the money we spend. It has to be a business in some respects. We however should focus on a few things we are not at the moment. Making it cheaper (let more people become doctors and more systems provide medical services, this means less regulation and no more ever increasing safety standards, medicine will not be perfectly safe anytime soon but it's already really safe. We are spending so much money on liability concerns) Making it more available (universal insurance would be pretty great and reduce costs) Making it more advanced (300-400 billion in medical R&D. If the US gets Universal Healthcare medical R&D plummets like a rock, our expensive healthcare funds the 300-500 R&D expenditure every year.)
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You’re gonna anger the ‘mericans.
The majority of Americans are in favor of universal healthcare.
However, only a very small majority. Less than 60%, if I remember correctly. Enough to be relevant, but probably far too little to change the prevailing circumstances (from which very influential people make a lot of money).