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Doctors making money from WMDs. Yet another from CNN about a group of doctors making their own Botox which has the minor side effect of paralyzing people. Oh, yeah, we really need to shield doctors from those terrible lawyers.

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No good deed will go unpunished. This is a story on CNN, and frankly it’s hard to imagine a better description of a frivolous lawsuit than this.

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It is a reality that an individual, no matter what the source of funding for medical care, has almost no choices. Doctors and other medical services providers, with the legally mandated exception of hospital emergency rooms, select whom they will accept as patients. Almost all specialists require a referral from another physician before they will even consider a new patient.

If you have a recurring problem that has always required the same medication, you can’t go to a pharmacy, buy the medicine, and get well. You have to have a doctor write a prescription, which wastes medical resources and your money. The same goes for drugs that people take for chronic illnesses, they have to be renewed, even though the drugs only stabilize the condition.

When it comes to something that requires hospitalization a lot of people have no choice at all. The hospital may be chosen by a doctor, an insurance company, or the simple fact the there is only one hospital in the area, but the patient rarely even gets asked if they have an opinion.

You can refuse treatment, if the courts and governor don’t decide to take an interest, but a second opinion is going to cost money.

The system is a mess and needs to be fixed, but a tax-exempt savings account isn’t going to make anything better, and people talking about “catastrophic policies” need to see the bill for a visit to an emergency room. It doesn’t take much to have a bill hit “catastrophic” levels.

The best current answer is to make the system more efficient by a single-payer system, like Medicare, that would simplify the business side of the health system. Only one set of codes, one set of prices, one billing form, one procedure for billing. The system would be administered by private contractors that were selected by competitive bids on a regional basis, just like Medicare.

This would eliminate the collection costs and problems of hospitals and doctors, reduce the size of billing operations, stabilize income for the medical industry, and generally reduce costs. This would also remove the cost of medical insurance from businesses, which would reduce their expenses.

If someone wants something more, they can buy additional coverage, as occurs in Europe and Canada. Medical providers would not be required to accept payments from the system, just as many don’t accept Medicare and Medicaid patients.

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From watching the way the Social Security Piratization is taking shape it would seem that Bush is putting forth background briefings to test plans, and then complaining when there is a negative reaction to what was said: Plausible Deniability taken to absurd lengths.

Until Bush writes something down and submits it, we don’t know what he’s going to do. Bush is selling vaporware, a simulation that can be altered until it reflects the desires of his target customer base. I have been in the computer business long enough to remember shows where the “hardware” displayed out front were empty cases with the displays powered by a much larger computer behind a curtain in the back of the booth.

At this point all that is certain is Bush’s desire to destroy Social Security, and hide the real deficit he has created.

The world will not continue to fund his “borrow and spend” policies. While Secretary Snow may, indeed, have a bad cold, he may also be avoiding a G7 meeting that will feature complaints about US economic problems.

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Friday Cat Blogging [^TM Kevin Drum]

Did someone mention food?

[Edit: Actually that’s all fur, not cat. In Summer, Cal was a much slimmer, black cat.]

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