1. My radio dialogue with Eliot Spitzer on financial regulation.
2. Using brain scans to increase social cooperation.
3. Gratitude enhances cooperation.
4. The supply and demand for doctors.
5. Someone thinks we should put lithium in the water supply.
I was favorably surprised by Spitzer in the first link.
From link #5: I believe it is fair to say that this writing energized a field in philosophy that centers on the word “enhancement,† a term that encompasses a set of medical interventions in which the goal is not to cure illness but rather to alter normal traits and abilities..
Statements like this illustrate how doctors are behind the curve and tend to aggrandize themselves. Doctors get to label someone as “diseased” or “ill” and then its fine to throw drugs at such people. But mental health, like most things, is better viewed as a continuum than as a binary variable. If you are with it enough to see this, then all forms of mental health medication are “enhancements”.
Supply of doctors matters?! Government works with docotrs unions(AMA) to structure licensing of who can do various health care procedures…and this increases costs?! what?…it couldn’t be…
No, I think we will just cut costs by forcing more people to buy more insurance. The costs of the various government programs are surely being over-estimated, because we will save a lot of money when health care costs are lowered.
That interview about doctors was pretty worthless. Also, since when did people believe that there was a surplus of doctors? It is a high-paying profession with lots of barriers to entry…oh no, that doesn’t sound like the characteristics of something with a shortage at all!
Did Spitzer call for more regulations on the price of hookers?
The US has 2.4 practicing physicians per 1,000 population (2004 numbers).
This is less than some countries (France & Germany: 3.4) but more than others (UK: 2.3, Canada: 2.1, Japan: 2.0). So I don’t see the “doctor shortage”.
Now our doctors do make more (US GPs make $161K, compared with UK: $118K, Canada: $107K, France: $92K, in PPP 2004). I suspect this is because countries with more socialized health systems apply greater cost control to doctors.
Source: http://wikileaks.org/wiki/CRS-RL34175
Congressional Research Service Report RL34175 “The U.S. Health Care Spending: Comparison with Other OECD Countries”
Did Spitzer call for more regulations on the price of hookers?
Peter,
Did he say he wants the Fed or the Treasury to do this?
Or maybe the DOJ?
#5 quote:
“Wealth is a source of health care creation; poverty is a source of health care consumption.”
Doug, prepare to be disappointed: the spambot comment seems to be a couple of sentences copied directly from this article:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/5251365/Natural-levels-of-lithium-in-drinking-water-help-reduce-suicides.html
I bet a human typed up the message, and has a bot spamming it in every “lithium” related comments section, figuring they’d mostly be (or at least include) recaps of the original article.
The article was not about a shortage of doctors. It is about massaging data to fit your agenda.
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