Medicine By Law Instead Of By Common Sense

The problem with government is it oversteps itself too often. It legislates where angels fear to tread.

For instance, in 1770s, the medical procedure of the time was to use leaches to bleed a patient. If a patient was strong enough, then he or she might even get better. The physician could then claim his “cure” worked.

In the current world, our legislatures would then declare that bleeding a patient was a cure for everyone and make legislation to insure that was the only way to cure that disease. They would make that “cure” part of the law, legislating that all physicians everywhere could only treat a patient by “bleeding” them.

Don't think that could happen? It all ready has. The “cure” for cancer is to place radioactive isotopes in the body in hope of poisoning the cancer out of a person. This has been made a law so that it takes the other options off the table for a physician. Physicians are restricted by law to prescribing only certain medicines for certain diseases by the FDA.

Dentistry has similar laws. The Dentist has only certain legal options in dealing with a patient.

These laws consistently tie the hands of qualified doctors. The laws are often 50 years out of date.

The American Medical Association is protecting its wallets. That is the only reason to direct Doctors in how to cure a disease or a patient. The drug companies are in on it with the way the FDA works.

Doctors that cure someone in a different way risk the wrath of the American Medical Association. This issue has come up recently in the last 5 years in a case of a cancer doctor. He has found a different method of cancer control that does not require surgery or radioactive chemicals. The FDA has tried everything under the Sun to put this man out of business. He is a Polish doctor that immigrated to this country.

Billions of dollars are at stake. If he cures cancer without surgery or radioactive chemicals he is threatening the income of an enormous number of surgeons in this country. It is no wonder that he is in trouble with the law. I mention this in passing because it is just one example of medicine by law.

We have known about this approach to cancer for a very long time. Using the immune system to detect cancers instead of surgery has been around since the 1920s. Of course it doesn't pay big money to surgeons everywhere, and is not a treatment of choice. It may or may not work. Well that goes for the other treatments too. Their statistics prove it is chancy at best to surgically remove cancers and use chemotherapy.

Now we are going to a completely different system of medicine. It is one in which every treatment everywhere is either qualified or not qualified by Medicare and Medicaid. If it is not, even if it is inexpensive and radically cures a disease quickly, you cannot get paid for it under system coming to your neighborhood physicians everywhere.

We are legislating cures. Get your leaches ready people. Medicine legislated is medicine that cannot change with new technology.

The other problem is the family physician on the scene cannot make a decent living anymore in a legitimate practice. They are encouraged to specialize. Well the specialists starve as well. In recent years the practice of insurance has led to underpaying the physicians big time. For instance, when I was under my company's insurance, it cost a doctor roughly $225 to break even, when he examined a patient. This was 5 years ago. I don't know what the number is today, I haven't asked him. I payed a $20 fee. The insurance paid the rest. It was called a co-pay. Under Medicare, my expense is roughly $109 to see a doctor. This includes my secondary insurance paying part of the cost. I think the copay might even be up to $35 now. I have no way of knowing.

I am not alone. This is the way Medicare has screwed us all. We get sick more often than young working people. Yet we pay at least 5 times as much to see a physician under current law.

The ultimate goal of government is to bleed our finances down so no one ever inherits anything amongst the middle and lower classes. The upper classes don't worry about it. They simply pay the best doctors there are. Most of them are out of the country by now.

The other problem doctors have is in our economy no one has the discretionary money to pay for doctors and medicine, unless you are rich. They are getting stiffed on the bill approximately 60% of the time. So unless you have a large organization backing you like a hospital, the individual practice is going the way of the dinosaur. A large hospital has ways of going after people that do not pay their bills. They have insurance that covers people that default. At least one hospital in your area takes care of the bums that cannot pay at all. It is supplemented by the government.

Part of the problem is the way we do medicine today. The lawyers have made sure the doctor has to have liability insurance. Otherwise, everything he owns will go down the tubes with one mistake in judgment.

Back in the day, family physicians wore themselves out seeing patients at all hours of day and night. These people did not have the liability problem because they were really cheap. They undercharged for these services big time. The American Medical Association changed all that. Now it is expensive to see a doctor after hours. Emergency rooms can charge you up to a $1000 or more dollars for a few hours in a hospital emergency room.

Common people do not have the available funds. So they stiff the emergency room a good portion of the time. Over half of the bankruptcies in this country are caused by medical facilities. I feel a lot of these treatments should have been sent home for family care. A lot of them are children that have gotten sick. They do not have the funds to give extensive care to the children in a medical place like a children's hospital. I just wonder how much of this is caused by medical liability concerns. Instead of keeping a child in one of these facilities for up to 6 weeks at approximately 500-1000 a day, could they have been cared for at home or on an out patient basis? I think so. The key is a paper releasing the hospital from liability.

The other problem is Medicaid. If you are bankrupt, then this is the system of choice. You have approximately 60 days of care under Medicare. Then all but 2,000 plus burial expenses, go to the government. In return, your friendly government will keep you in a nursing home at a cost of 4,000 to 6,000 a month. (My figures are guesswork based on people I have known in such facilities.)

They will take your social security check and leave you $40 a month for expenses.

Now a lot of these people get less than $800 a month to live on outside a nursing home. Yet our government is willing to pay 4,000 a month or more if you are in a nursing home. Something a little wrong here?

The entire system of medicine and financing it is wrong. A lot of it comes down to accounting. The doctor opts for the expensive procedure. He gets paid more in theory – If he gets paid at all . . .

Legislating treatments is wrong. It freezes procedures to what is available at the time the law is enacted. The American Medical Association is behind legislating treatments. The drug companies are in partnership with this Association. The result is treatments that are 50 years out of date sometimes.

One hospital was put out of business for a short time on the west coast. The nurses had a union and closed it down for poor wages and working conditions. They picketed the hospital. The result was found out later, that the lack of medical care actually lowered the mortality rate of the county by 50%.

There is something really wrong with those numbers
. . .

There is something really wrong with the way our country practices medicine and law.

(Authored by Dave Webb)

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