On Hospitals, Doctors and Quick Bucks

Our genius president, who is much, much smarter than Moose Barbie Sarah Palin, keeps suggesting that doctors are trying to make quick bucks by removing your body parts instead of going for preventative medicine. Our Monks of Miscellaneous Musings continue the analysis of it here.

Recall the situation in Oregon where a lady suffering from cancer was denied expensive medication by the Oregon health board (“death panel” by omission rather than commission), who was it that stepped in and provided the meds for free? That’s right, the evil pharmaceutical company. Why? Beyond any sense of altruism that may have guided the decision, they had skin in the game. They had a (gasp), profit-motive.

Where the government had no incentive to keep this woman alive (indeed, in order to control costs, they had every incentive for this woman to be permanently taken off the rolls), Big Pharma has every incentive for people to stay alive in order to continue to buy their products. So, greed is good

Big Pharma: Keeping people alive so that they can live to pay another day.

And that is the crux of the matter. If doctors were travelling creatures, roaming from town to town, making quick bucks as they performed surgeries, then the president's hypothesis would hold. But doctors aren't like that. They require an enormous infrastructure to exist. They sit atop a pyramid of capital investment and labor in the form of buildings, equipment, skilled and unskilled assistants, hi-technology devices, elaborate pharmaceutical research and so on. They're about as fixed in place as any professional out there. The thought that they would risk their entire infrastructure or that their hospitals would allow them to chop off limbs and risk monster lawsuits so they could make a few thousand dollars is idiocy.

"Well, the hospital lost $35,576,000 in the lawsuit to the patient, but we did score $12,000 on the amputation fees!"