On Wed, 26 Sep 2001 20:10:14 -0400, you wrote:
>At 06:27 PM 9/26/2001 -0500, Randy Smith wrote:
>>>That's great. I'm delighted by the recent developments in home testing and
>>>automatic monitoring technologies. I can't wait until we can all routinely
>>>monitor key health metrics. (I'd like to see a thread on this: what can
>>>you monitor easily now, and what's worth doing? I might not want the
>>>Japanese analyzing toilet but I think I'd get a watch that monitored your
>>>EKG and warned if you were on the brink of a heart attack.) So many
>>>problems (in life overall, not just in medicine) are trivial if you detect
>>>and deal with them right away and become increasingly severe if you don't.
>>
>>That sounds like a great idea, but I doubt that this will happen anytime
>>soon here in the USA, at least for anyone but yuppie income and above, not
>>unless you want to shell out big bucks. The physicians' goons,
>>err...lobbyists have too strong a chokehold on Corp-Gov-Media.
>
>HMOs and insurance companies could reasonably want to see monitoring
>technologies become more widespread, as a way of lowering their costs, much
>as HMOs subsidize the cost of health club memberships. Early detection can
>save them many thousands per patient in treatment costs.
Well, why do you think they would save money? The medical profession.
like any other, charges whatever the market will bear. Tumor removal,
whether at stage 2 or stage 4, is something that even if the charges
go up, the market will not change that much.
Why would finding a tumor 2 months earlier save the insurance cos any
money in the long run? So if the hospitals/doctors can no longer get
on average 45K for a tumor because X percentage of tumors are now at
stage 2 instead of stage 4, then hospitals/doctors just increase the
price for stage 2 tumor removals. They have the money to buy
corp-gov-media and so the status quo will not change...
>In any case, I do have "yuppie income and above",
Good for you! So do I.
However, 50% or more of American citizens do not, and perhaps they
would like to have similar opportunities.
I guess the poor folks just need to start hanging some rich folks and
politicians until they start representing them again.
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