Health Care

[Hoopster81]

An essay on one of my medical school apps asks:

Please discuss the most significant issue affecting the future of health care delivery in the country in which you intent to practice medicine (the U.S.).

I believe this issue is clearly the availability of affordable health care, but I am at sort of a loss as to some potential solutions to the dilemma. All that I've got is expansion of Medicare/Medicaid and increased government subsidies for prescription drugs; however, I am fairly ignorant to how health care systems operate in other countries (besides Canada).

Would appreciate any input!

Wow. You will only walk away from this forum more confused than when you came here. You're going to get every conflicting answer you can think of from universal health care to cessation of all government funds for health care, to complete anarcho-capitalism where I pay you 5 dollars more than the other guy to choke a pigeon and we beg old men to fund cancer research. Go away now while you still have your mind.

It also depends on what way you lean politically. Once you know that, just do an internet search.

probably delivering long term care to the baby boomers in about 10-20 years will be a big problem (which like all problems turns into opportunity)

[Borodog]

[ QUOTE ]
An essay on one of my medical school apps asks:

Please discuss the most significant issue affecting the future of health care delivery in the country in which you intent to practice medicine (the U.S.).

I believe this issue is clearly the availability of affordable health care, but I am at sort of a loss as to some potential solutions to the dilemma. All that I've got is expansion of Medicare/Medicaid and increased government subsidies for prescription drugs; however, I am fairly ignorant to how health care systems operate in other countries (besides Canada).

Would appreciate any input!

[/ QUOTE ]

Expansion of Medicare/Medicaid and increased government subsidies for prescription drugs will make problems worse.

The largest problem facing the future of health care delivery is government regulation and intervention.

[cdxx]

watch last sunday's episode (presidential debate) of The West Wing. it's a pretty pretty good recap of general debate on health care there.

the biggest issue, IMO, is universal health care insurance, and its availability, regardless of employment/financial status.

Socialized medicine, or increasingly socialized medicine, is always a tempting way to go when it seems that not everyone has access to the health care they need. People can't afford something? Why, pass a law that it has to be cheaper for god's sake! Simple! Just make the government steal the money from rich people and make THEM pay for it!

To say nothing of the myriad moral problems there are with appropriating the wealth of others to finance someone else's healthcare, socialized medicine is not very pragmatic either. The problem is that when healthcare is free, neither the client or the provider has any incentive to control costs, and this makes costs spiral out of control.

I don't know what medical schools are looking for in this essay, but if it were me, i'd write about medical savings accounts. I think the widespread availability of MSAs would be the best thing for our healthcare system.

[lehighguy]

In general you have the following trade offs:

1) Government run healthcare distributes more equally but is generally of poorer overall quality.

2) Health care and medicine is an industry where things you do now effect things in the future, but you can't see the effect till you get there. Case in point, patents restrict medicine now but provide incentive to develope new medicine for the future.

3) Most of health care economics is about incentives. People will do rediculous things if you place them in a certain incentive scheme.

4) In my experience one of the areas where government can actually add +EV is in catastrophic case coverage. They are in a better posistion to handle the risk involved and thus have to devote less resources to administration and management of that risk the private companies.

5) The FDA sucks hard. I don't even know why we have it. Read one of natedogs posts on the subjects.

[lehighguy]

I only caught a glimpse of the debate. I was generally dissapointed with the republican character. But the actor is actually a liberal and its a liberal show, so I'm not suprised he doesn't really understand his sides perspective.

[Jdanz]

pretty lucid.

[renodoc]

I agree that biggest issue is how to deal with baby boomers.

Answer should be to phase out medicare over the next 40 years. Allow physicians to privately contract with medicare patients. Repeal HIPPA and EMTALA.
Repeal the sustainable growth rate formula for reimbursement.

I could go on and on and on and on and on.

Oh yeah. Ted Kennedy needs to retire.