Forty-three days until I’m a doctor!

That is all.

Open Lab

So this post is very late.

Bittersweet was accepted into Openlab 2009, which is now available at lulu.com!

You can see a review here at boingboing.

Hopefully I’ll be somewhat more prolific writing starting in June or so, as I wrap up med school and get ready for the Real World.  Thanks all for bearing with me!

Kudos to Sanjay Gupta

I haven’t always been kind to Dr Gupta – on TV I generally find him too much journalist, not enough doctor.

Strangely, he’s been getting flack from journalists for being too much doctor, not enough journalist! This article refers to criticism Dr Gupta has gotten for becoming too much a part of the story he’s covering.

I have only one thing to say to this. Kudos to Dr Gupta! When push comes to shove, and lives are in danger, taking care of those most in need takes priority over the “rules” of journalism.

What’s happening in Haiti right now is tragic. If you have something to donate, help out. My charity of choice is Doctors Without Borders, you can find a link to donate to them on my sidebar.

The 124th Meeting Of The Skeptics’ Circle

Hello all, and welcome to the 124th meeting of the longest running skeptical blog carnival!

Second Call for Skeptic’s Circle Submissions!

Hey everyone!

 

Remember to get your best skeptical writing up and running. The next skeptics’ circle is fast approaching, I’ll be accepting submissions up until 5pm on Wednesday November 18th. If all goes well the Circle should be up the morning of Thursday the 19th.

Skeptics’ Circle!

Hey everyone, check out the newest Skeptics’ Circle is up over at Blue Genes! Check it out.

Be sure to get your best skeptical blogging ready, because I’m hosting the next Skeptics’ Circle on November 19th!

…Annnnnd we’re back

Some of you may have noticed the complete absence of posts for the past couple of months. Life has been far beyond busy and blogging just kind of got slowly pushed to hiatus. Anyway, I’m back at least for now.

A Short Post on Capitalism and Healthcare

I’d posted this as a comment on Mike the Mad Biologists blog a couple of days ago, and someone mentioned that it would be nice to have this in linkable form.

Someone over there said this about insurance companies:

Insurance companies do nothing wrong. They are FOR-PROFIT publicly traded companies whose obligations are to their shareholders. It’s actually illegal to some degree for them not to make as much profit as they can. They don’t make money by paying out. They make it by NOT paying out. It’s capitalism, folks

Whether health care is something that should be (out)sourced to the private sector is one question, and reasonable people can probably disagree. But expecting the private sector to act like the public? That’s just crazy.

I found that comment ridiculous on a number of levels. Most striking is the knee jerk “It’s capitalism.” So often people tell me that, without actually knowing what capitalism is. At any rate, below is my response in full, I hope that it clears up a couple of the deceptive or ignorant things people say about health care and “the market.”

Insurance companies do nothing wrong.

Idiotic statement.

They are FOR-PROFIT publicly traded companies whose obligations are to their shareholders. It’s actually illegal to some degree for them not to make as much profit as they can.

To be clear, wrong is a moral judgement, not a legal judgement. There could be a law FORCING insurance companies to shoot sick people in the head for profit, and it would still be morally wrong. There is no such law.

To argue that insurance companies are doing things that are legal, that’s a different kettle of fish.

Recission is legal. That’s why insurance companies do it. When questioned on the subject by congress, the insurance company representatives uniformly said that would NOT stop practicing rescission because rescission is legal. There is no question that recission is morally wrong. So insurance companies can do wrong, and do so regularly.

They don’t make money by paying out. They make it by NOT paying out. It’s capitalism, folks

I hate the “It’s capitalism.” argument. It’s not capitalism. That’s not the definition of capitalism. I encourage you to open an economics textbook. Capitalism is an economic system in which the means of production are privately owned, and labor/goods/capital are traded on a to-varying-degrees free market. Capitalism says NOTHING about insurance companies “paying out.”

Infact, in a large way insurance companies as-they-are-now are anti-capitalist, or at least anti-freemarket. “Free markets” only work when certain assumptions are met including:

-Markets need to be open: They generally aren’t in healthcare, you can only choose from options your employer has.

-Information is abundant: Not true in the insurance markets. Even the insurance reps don’t understand what they’re selling most of the time. I promise you most of my patients don’t know head or tails of what the options in front of them mean.

-People act rationally: Also not true in healthcare. People don’t understand their own “self interest” when it comes to healthcare. That’s the entire point of doctors – you’re paying for our expertise to give you an idea of what’s in your best interest. And there are no good markers to determine how to rationally choose a “good doctor,” which feeds the information problem above.

-No externalities: That is, the freemarket assumes every benefit or cost in the system is contained within the prices given. That’s 100% not true for healthcare. Your health is the definition of an externality. You can’t reasonably put a price on it, and if you could, you could not rationally divide up that price. That is, even if you said “X dollars is the cost of a life,” you couldn’t reasonably say “and Y percentage of X is the value of keeping my blood pressure under control.”

There are others, but those are the ones that come to mind. Clearly, it’s not just “that’s capitalism,” and saying so betrays a huge misunderstanding of the basic concepts we’re talking about.

 

Whether health care is something that should be (out)sourced to the private sector is one question, and reasonable people can probably disagree. But expecting the private sector to act like the public? That’s just crazy.

 

The question was never having the private sector act like the public sector. The question was “can the private sector blatantly deceive it’s customers about what it’s selling forever with impunity.”

Healthcare Reform

There is a ton of misinformation about healthcare reform being spread around.

I’ll try and put together some resources, and maybe riff a little myself on the subject sometime this week.

In the meantime, check out this quick illustration of my point by Paul Krugman.

The 116th Meeting of the Skeptics’ Circle:The Wooful ER

It’s time for your favorite blog carnival and mine, the Skeptics’ Circle!

 I had the most horrible dream the other day. After watching a Mitchell and Webb Sketch about a homeopathic ER, I had nightmares of being trapped in an ER just chock full of Woo, and other nonskeptical gibberish.

Walk with me, through the valley of woo, in the nightmare that is the wooful ER.