Pics are worth a thousand words. Below is the problem.

Hint: it starts on the left…(fever and cough)

(Garrison Bliss created this)

Crazy, but true…

I’m transitioning Docs to my fee for care model. One 3 weeks ago made $300 profit last month. Yes, her front desk MA makes more than her.

A new for-profit Doc in Fort Worth isn’t even trying to start a practice.

What a waste of all those years in practice…

The larger purpose of the blog, however, is to call attention to a terrific series of editorials Investor’s Business Daily has published. The first of those is here, and there’s a link below to a page from which the series can be accessed.

IBD Series The Audacity of Socialism

AFTERWORD

Get in Sync

Childlike, I watched with fascination as the soft-drink bottles rolled off the assembly line. The big machine washed them, assembled them, moved them along the conveyor belt, filled them, capped them, and put them into cases. I counted 12 different operations that the system performed.

Then I realized something: almost all of those operations relied on gravity. The bottles had to stand upright. The fluid had to flow downhill and remain in place in the bottles. The caps had to slide down the column and rest on the lips of the bottles before the machine crimped them in place. And so on.

The fellows who invented this system knew they could not repeal the law of gravity. And they knew they needed to harness, not oppose, that force. Their machine was in sync.

I wish those inventors could appear before Congress and at a session of the Presidential candidates. They need to tell them that the systems you invent must not try to contradict the laws of nature; they must work with them.
But the rules politicians try most to oppose are not the law of gravity but the laws of human nature, laws which cannot be repealed even by a unanimous vote. And if you try to run a big operation counter to them, nothing works.

Like Communism. It was a nice idea, everybody working for everybody else, but it went against the grain. Check with the Soviet Republics. Look at both sides of the Berlin wall as it came down — prosperity in the privatized West, “economic devastation” (again, that’s Greenspan’s word) in the centrally controlled East.

Just take control of health care away from the individual, and you have the National Health Service of the U. K., where one million people are currently in line waiting for hospital admission. Or forbid private medicine, as in Canada, where 40 weeks is the average to get indicated orthopedic treatment and where 35% more women die of breast cancer than in the U. S. Is nationalized health care running smoothly in Germany? Ask the 15,000 of 20,000 university physicians who went on strike in March of 2006.

However, we’re getting there. The most pressing example in the U. S. is the removal of control of the health care dollar from the people who earned it and owned it. Almost half (46%) of the $2.2 trillion health bill is now paid by government (how do you like the quality of this half—including Medicare, Medicaid, and Veterans’ benefits—compared with the private half?). Another third (33%) is controlled by insurance companies who in turn are responsive only to the employers. Only 13% of the American health dollar is paid direct by individuals. So what is the individual citizen to do? Will he economize with money he can’t control? Does he wash his rental car?

Only if he is allowed to own his private fund — as in Health Savings Accounts — will the laws of human nature begin to operate again. Only then will he ask the prices, compute the risks and benefits. Multiple studies show a one-third drop in expenditures wherever HSA plans are in effect.

The Congress, and the President, and the people need to agree on systems which resonate with — and amplify — nature’s immutable laws, not conflict with them.

They need to get in sync.