How often do you go to the doctor? And when you do, how long does it take the doctor to treat what you have? The fact is, most healthy Americans don’t visit the doctor all that often for non-catastrophic reasons, and when they do, they don’t visit with the doctor for all that long and they don’t receive very elaborate treatment.
(emphasis added)
While I applaud the effort, I think the concept is fatally flawed. Here's why:
I'm not a doctor, but I have studied the human body, human physiology, and human action for decades. The fact of the matter is that I could see 80% of those people who
don’t visit with the doctor for all that long and
they don’t receive very elaborate treatment. I would need to know enough to spot the 20% or so who had problems bigger than I could treat, but there is no doubt that I could help a lot of people, at a fraction of the cost and bother associated with seeing a doctor. I would make housecalls.
But then I would be infringing on the 95-year old privileges of the American medical guild. Guilds survive only with the liberal application of government force, and there is little doubt that if I were to set up such a business, I would eventually find myself facedown on the pavement with a machine gun pressed to the back of my head.
It's not just the insurance that makes medicine expensive and poor quality. It's the economic organization of the profession. As long as it is illegal for me to charge you $5 to pick a splinter from your hand with a $2.5 million DaVinci robot mounted in the back of my van, while a guild member can do it with a pair of pliers and charge you $100 for an office visit, the costs will continue to climb, the service will continue to deteriorate, and eventually there will be shortages and rationing. Just like we are seeing today.
Peace,
Silver