Cost of Waiting Under Single-Payer Healthcare

Money cannot capture the cost of waiting. Single-Payer healthcare separates costs and benefits.

Politicians and bureaucrats draft attractive policies but ignore the costs of their plans.

Waiting for care robs the Canadian economy of almost $15 billion. Patients lose over $2 billion as individuals.

But money misses the most important robbery.

Many patients awaiting hip replacement cannot play with their grandkids and struggle with basic bodily functions.

Self-employed plumbers cannot crawl under cottages to fix plumbing, while they wait for new knees.

Single-Payer Costs

Waiting for care costs. Most of the costs cannot be measured. Every Mom, Dad, and business-owner puts a huge burden on all the people who depend on them, when they are forced to wait for care.

I received this from a physician: Continue reading “Cost of Waiting Under Single-Payer Healthcare”

Physicians Promote Victorian Virtues

I just finished Whole30.

The diet eliminates everything except meat and vegetables for 30 days.

Whole30 worked well and felt like death.

Doctors promote diet and exercise, all the time.

Dieting takes discipline. Discipline is a virtue. Ergo, doctors promote virtue.

Virtue is good. The lack of virtue is bad. Thus, doctors dictate morality on unsuspecting patients.

How dare they!

Doctors do it all the time. In fact, special billing codes pay doctors to promote health. That is, government pays doctors to promote virtue.

Wait a second! That is not true. Continue reading “Physicians Promote Victorian Virtues”

Social Determinants of Wealth

We learn to fly by looking up, not down. Cheetahs cannot teach us about flight. Only birds can.

We can know everything about ground travel and remain clueless about flight.

If we want to defy gravity, we must study those who defy gravity. We must copy them; adopt their mannerisms; mirror their environment.

We cannot achieve prosperity by studying the destitute. We might learn what not to do, but that is not enough. Experts on poverty cannot teach prosperity.

Poverty as Disease

Medical doctors who study poverty examine it like a disease. Every disease has a cause. Find the cause; cure the disease.

Understanding disease process leads to treatment aimed at cure. This approach has produced tremendous success for medicine.

Health promoters still criticize doctors for emphasizing diagnosis and treatment. Patients can be disease-free but unhealthy. Doctors now promote health, too, but it required a change in focus.

Anti-poverty activists seem to think that expertise about poverty will fix poverty. They start in the wrong spot. They see poverty as an abnormal state arising from some noxious cause or disordered process.

Wealth, in a middle class sense, is common in North America. But it is not normal. Continue reading “Social Determinants of Wealth”