As I noted, bean-counters have determined a human life is worth a specific amount of money. That’s what reducing human life to an actuarial table or a statistic does. That’s a reasonably good thing to know when formulating a strategy, but it’s useless when formulating a tactic for treating an individual.

Letting insurers bargain for services is an entirely different thing. Most dental insurance requires the insured to pay (I’m not looking it up, so I’ll generalize) $15 for a filling, $500 for a crown and $2000 for an implant. The dentist who accepts that insurance gets a fixed rate per job, and gets a large potential customer base. Here the insurance company basically raises the costs for the customer to promote early care, and promotes a large customer base to the provider in return for a lower, fixed rate. That works a treat for some types of standard care, particularly the diagnostic and preventative kind. Mammograms, colonoscopies, flu shots, annual checkups, eye exams, fillings and the like. It is not a good model when designing a chemotherapy treatment for cancer.

My neighbor is cured, by the way — cancer-free for three years and hopefully forever. A relative didn’t make it, died in his early 30’s from a rare cancer. At that time there were maybe a dozen cases in the journals to draw notes from, chemo for it had to be invented. In the case of my relative his contributions to the knowledge of that cancer led to others being cured, to new chemotherapy and advances in radiation treatment. I *still* get calls from the physicians who treated him, so closely did we bond over those agonizing years between diagnosis and death. To a one they each tell me of the knowledge gained by the experiments and the names of people they’ve successfully treated because of them. And I dare say no bean-counter in an insurance company or in a government office will ever stop looking at his spreadsheets long enough to ponder the potential benefits a non-standard treatment today may have 30 years down the road.

That is the fear of socialized medicine, that my choices will be limited and some faceless bean-counter will tell my doctor what he can and cannot do, and I’ve no recourse to appeal that decision. Nothing annoys a person like having somebody else tell them what they deserve.

– Max

Yak at you later, Will

I am hereby providing notice that I am taking a vacation from blogging. [BEEP]

How about an Exotic Export? Lone Star Light?

It’s what I drink.

doorkeeper, I would love to buy you and everybody else, who hangs out here a Guinness, or three.

Let’s plan on Kris’s Bunker dedication ceremony, it should happen in the Fall,which is the best time of the year to be in New England. By the way where is the En- Gland located anyway? And what happened to the Old En-Gland?
I unfortunately type much slower than I think. Orders of Magnitude slower!

And DO NOT push your luck, good sir. I do believe I said “sometime tomorrow” which would be “sometime today”. And I am taking full advantage of the East Coast time difference here. Cuz its only 7:55 in Lex Land……….

Don’t push it. Uh uh. No way. No how. See? Told you I am feeling like a moonbat tonight. This is worse than trying to get a paper done for school.
And BTW….and this is significantly important………IF I don’t start actually working soon (the kind that pays $$), well I won’t have a health care crisis (heh, take that!) but there will be severe consequences for my family!

And I am giving up blogging after this sucker. Which is not a blog. Its a treatise. And you will be sorry cuz you will have to read it!

okay, I’m think I’m done. Thanks for the chance to vent – really needed it. In case you couldn’t tell. Anyone got a beer?

PS One more thing – the majority of the readers of this fine…..blog…….have been conspicuous in their absence. Come on, people, this one unkawill is so anxioulsy waiting for took some work.