Step 1: Start with making medical school not only free, but paid. Yes, pay people minimum wage to go to medical school. Mission: make medical knowledge widely available.
Step 2: The Government(s) in the US start an entrepreneurial state initiative. Amend the state laws to allow foreign governments to sell the state/local government medicine via block quotes and RFPs. (This could cost up to $50,000 per state in lobbying fees). Use entrepreneurial state initiatives to offer a public payer option, not based on individual eligibility or income. Mission: insert too much competition into the market.
Step 3: Promote and pass new policies and standards of HEALTH PRIVACY. The mass availability of your health data to companies via HIPAA Business Associate Agreements opens up the health industry to too many profit models. This data flow needs to be restricted and made “local only”, allowing only aggregate data marts in places like the CDC/NIH. Mission: restrict business freedom in the health markets.
Step 4: Wait for supply/demand to go lopsided and trigger the “health worker crisis of 2028” where health worker unemployment goes up. This is a good thing! Now we can fix the system by providing a backbone where private industry has failed the health worker. Mission: save workers’ lives and livelihood, thus initiating a new capitalistic contract whereby the health customer is no longer the enemy, and health workers are available to provide care on a truly supply/demand basis as opposed to at the whim of their respective handlers and “stakeholders” … using incentive to promote health outcomes (pay for wellness, not time/materials) pushing advanced health technology (by creating the need for innovation through increased business restrictions) as a major export (surplus workforce) and as a source of tourism (decreased cost).
Sounds like victim blaming. If our healthcare industry wasn’t an utter shit show, she wouldn’t have taken the fish antibiotics, and she wouldn’t need a job to get health insurance.
Also, a job is no goddamned guarantee of health insurance thanks to the wide-ranging tactic of hiring people for part-time work – under 30 hours a week – and avoiding the need to supply them with benefits, like health insurance.
My youngest daughter is in that situation. She’s working for a company, and lost her Medicaid benefits. She has Type-1 diabetes, and after this month is facing having to pay for her insulin out-of-pocket, because she doesn’t have health insurance, because they don’t have to give her health insurance. And even if she did, the powers-that-be are jacking up the price of insulin, because they have a captive customer base. It’s not a luxury good. Without it, people will die. But they are being allowed to do it because it’s a free market, and fuck the poor.
Unfortunately, there is no “one place” to start. The US has this system of “health scarcity” imposed where it leans on the individual to be pro-active and informed. With a few specifics, I can help out in almost any case where the payer is not identified, because every state and territorial health system is incredibly different. The best place to start is your state’s medicaid website. After that, get on the phone with a case manager. Case management is a federally funded program (offered directly through your state on a 90/10 match) to ensure that you’re not only getting appropriate care, but also care that is sanctioned and subsidized by the state to ensure no payment issues arise. A case manager can help with eligibility issues, scheduling, billing and authorizations.
Isn’t medical knowledge already widely available? I would expect the problem is getting competent people capable of learning that knowledge and gaining the experience to apply it properly. That in turn would seem to first require a much larger overhaul of the educational system.
No. Medical knowledge is not widely available, when the other things you mentioned are also not widely available in tandem. There are millions of young minds becoming available for knowledge annually. By incentivizing that the knowledge be learned, you can essentially ensure so many capable people show up. Attacking the root cause of the problem works to alleviate the additional symptoms.
Wanna meet up at the insulin factory later? Bring friends, we’ll do a raid and sing kum-bye-ya after. If there were ever a case for the nationalization of 1 thing, man oh man insulin would be it.
I’m saying I support the wide break-up of the insulin industry, a revocation of the insulin patents, and support providing it and other life-saving medicines either at cost or free. I’m saying people ought to take this line of business away from the people currently controlling the market, by force if necessary.
That’s why I was checking. Whenever I’ve encountered someone suggesting we sing kum-bye-ya out in the world, they’ve usually been a right-wing doink acting an asshole. But your earlier comments offering help and suggestions didn’t match up with that attitude, so I was a bit confused.
This implies “medical knowledge” is somehow locked up in a secret guarded bunker, or something.
I would certainly agree medical knowledge is not readily accessible – but isn’t that because medicine is hard, especially if you’re going to do it right, and you wouldn’t want someone to do it unless they can do it right?
I myself have used veterinary products (for horses, my wife and I have a small horse farm) because sometimes there are actually better products available than what is available for human beings. Here’s one example:
This is an excellent product that contains an antifungal, antibacterial, and steroidal mixture that works very well for treating plaque psoriasis. There is no similar product available for me because some idiot pharmacological patent examiner granted an exclusive patent on the process of combining 2 or more creams or ointments to treat a particular skin condition in human beings. The only other option that I would have would be to try to get my doctor to approve a combination and then take the several products to a compounding pharmacy and try to get them to combine them for me, and they might not be willing to do that because they would be violating a patent.
So, yeah, when I can get a vet to prescribe some for one of the horses, I’m sometimes using it as well. And I’ve considered at times whether to take fish-mox or fish-mycin when I thought that I had an infection.
We got something like that in Brazil.
The number of MD that graduates per year doubled in ten years (~2002 to 2012), and it is expected that in 2022 it will be the triple of the number from 2002.
The health access has improved, but we didn’t get to the problem in step 4 yet, and it seems that the growth rhythm will decrease due the economic crisis and some lobby to restrict the number of new MD per year.
The biggest problem is that only way to make it more affordable is to reduce the salary paid to a MD through the increase in supply, but that also comes with a loss in status and a fierce opposition from the status quo.
A few more articles and the whole BB gang will have written about this. Sadly, I think it’ll still be a relevant phenomenon long enough for that to happen…
This has been going on for a while - I recollect reading some story about some '80s band that was taking fish antibiotics before they hit it big to clear up various… infections they picked up (I want to say Guns and Roses?).
Yeah I came here to share the same thing. Although I wouldn’t think the shelf life is that great on antibiotics? I do have some extras of my thyroid meds in my freezer just in case though.
They will usually try to find a cheaper option if you ask, as long as there is a cheaper option that will still work for you. I have some antibiotic allergies so my list is limited a bit.
THIS IS HOW YOU GET C. DIFF.
Seriously though, using antibiotics all willy nilly, that is what gets you c. diff. I have had c. diff. I would not wish it on anyone.
Parts of the US healthcare system have effectively become legalized extortion on a vulnerable public. And medical insurance is like a protection racket.
I mean…
“Efficiency and progress is ours once more
Now that we have the Neutron bomb
It’s nice and quick and clean and gets things done
Away with excess enemy
But no less value to property
No sense in war but perfect sense at home”
