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Comment by roughly | Hacker News Reader

It's kind of incredible that we've let a bunch of weenies with MBAs put our lives and health in the kind of risk that the modern medical system puts us in. Every single story from a doctor or a nurse over the last decade involves being overworked, not having time to actually diagnose patience, lack of sleep, and rapid burnout. On the patient side, what we get for that level of hospital "efficiency" are medical bills that would bankrupt anyone below the top 3% if they don't have insurance, rapidly rising medical insurance costs, and what could charitably be described as prescription drug costs that are not based on the cost of the drug.

The business side, though, is going swimmingly, so there's that, at least.

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The doctors themselves have as much to blame for this too, not to mention most hospital administrators are MBAs with a healthcare background, they are not art students.

Medicine perpetuates a hazing culture of overworking residents thanks to a jumped up medicine pioneer who took too much cocaine. They refuse to come up with a way to train doctors at scale and instead restrict it to physical residency spots, keeping their compensations high. Train doctors like engineers, break up the medical unions and lobby groups with the anti trust act and most of the problems will be solved.

Exactly, it's the AMA that's a big part of it. Doctors could stop this by just refusing to work that way. They are the ones with the knowledge and skills and licenses to do what they do, so they are ultimately in the driver's seat.

Refuse to work that way?? And how are we supposed to do that? Stop working until our requirements are met and leave everyone on their own during that time? Who do you think people would blame? The C-suite execs?

The only choice you really have is to leave medicine. After dedicating ten years of your life to it's study, a fucking huge debt and no guarantee of finding a better life elsewhere.

This is not unique to the US where MBAs / business-minded people are the driving factor for healthcare workers being overworked.

In Canada most fully-trained doctors are paid per patient (AKA fee-for-service)[1] and so there is a huge incentive to rush through as many patients in a day, which results in overwork for the residents (who are salaried) and nurses (also salaried), and no time for adequate education of medical students and residents.

[1] https://www.dr-bill.ca/blog/billing-tips/physician-payment-m...

The insurance scam in this country sets a worldwide standard for fleecing the stupid. Or, more accurately, fleecing everyone by taking advantage of the stupid.

The failure to divorce your health insurance from your job is what created the mess we have today. It arose from wage caps during WWII, and instead of fixing the defective legislation at the time... Congress just let it fester until it became the life-ruining disgrace that Americans live with daily.

With the strident support of fools who believe that they're getting "free" insurance from their employers... and anything else insurance companies tell them, legislators, lobbyists, drug companies, big corporations all line up against affordable health insurance. Big corporations get workers chained to dead-end jobs by their insurance. Insurance companies and big pharma get windfall profits because the real costs to consumers are buried behind "free" insurance that is profoundly not free.

And nobody in government or politics has the balls to call this out. Subsidizing this rip-off is, in some ways, even worse. Just like subsidizing the obscene rip-off that college has become.

It's easy to get what's going on once you realise it's a sickness industry, nothing to do with health.

You want lots of sick people to treat a lot. Doctors being short on time etc, is fine - it's business.

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