You sure you want this guy working on your car? He’d be the one charging you five hundred dollars for a new alternator when all he did was replace the belt.

We need to be able to sue doctors because there’s no other way to hold them accountable. We’d like to think most of them are in the business to help people, but they aren’t saints any more than auto mechanics are. Doctors are in it for the money, just like everybody else.

Frivolous lawsuits are indeed a problem, and not only in medicine. The solution is not to prevent all lawsuits - making doctors completely unaccountable. How about punishing people who file frivolous suits? By which I mean, the lawyers that represent them - the litigants don’t usually have any money to take, although they might have a kidney or two worth extracting.

The main cause of frivolous lawsuits, however, is not greed. It’s people who have colossal medical bills and no means of payment. The only way they can avoid donating their house to the hospital is to make someone’s insurance company cough up. And it isn’t just people without insurance - even “good” insurance is usually inadequate when something really bad happens, let alone an HMO or Medicaid. Insurance companies will do everything they can to wriggle out of paying your bills, and they leave themselves plenty of loopholes to do so.

Can you really blame their victims for trying to make them (or some other insuror) pay up at the other end of the pipe? You can’t sue an insurance company with any prospect of winning, but you can sue a doctor, and his insuror WILL pay.

I don’t have contempt for doctors. My doctor is totally awesome and I think she’s a great person. And I’m certainly not mad at you, Doc Joe, for wanting to be paid. I have a job too, and I also expect to be compensated for the work I do. My only problem with almost everything you said is that it was mean spirited and offensive - and I felt that you were looking down on people for not paying you enough money.

If you are a good doctor DocJoe, which from the sounds of it you feel that you are, then I would gladly pay you whatever I could afford to take advantage of your services. I would just ask that you keep in mind that not all of us can afford to pay you as well as you might like. Perhaps that means that we can’t come to you for health care, but it most definitely isn’t a situation of our own choosing - we’d probably love to make lots of money and give some of it to you when we’re sick.

How does not having the means to pay you ourselves for good service make us dumb? I might be well aware of the fact that paying you more might result in better service, but that doesn’t necessarily make me capable of doing it. All I want is to be healthy and have my doctor care about my well being, and I don’t feel like that is entirely too much to ask.

Sarah, your post is pathetic. It is one reason I chose to care mostly for the elderly. Instead of getting mad at me for wanting to get paid for services, you should get mad at a government taking money out of your paycheck to pay for the insurance of seniors many of whom are rich. On top of that, your generation thinks nothing of spending $5000 on a boob job but balks at a $50 office visit.

Grow up. Quit calling doctors assholes because they won’t work for you for free. The least you could do if you don’t have money to pay them is offer some type of a service to them.

#9 and 10, One of you writes that we need more doctors and the other writes that I should be an auto mechanic. Your posts show me how schizophrenic the public is with regards to doctors.

#9, the laws of supply and demand only work when prices aren’t fixed. Prices are fixed by the government, and insurers follow the government’s lead. Where there are more doctors, health care costs are higher not lower.

#10 “You want to be well-paid and well-respected but your post evidences nothing but contempt for those who you think should pay you lavishly and shower you with praise and respect.”

Right, nobody has a problem with doctors other than me. Your use of the word “you” shows me how clueless you are. Most doctors get paid much more from insurers than patients. To be well respected and paid by insurers, a doctor has to keep costs as low as possible often neglecting what is best for the patient as in my example.

And yes, I do have contempt for patients who are too dumb to realize this. If you want your doctor to do what is best for you, you need to pay him yourself.

I’m just saying that while some people might take advantage of the system, some of us are actually trying to get by the old fashioned way. Maybe DocJoe could consider that next time he’s handing out crappy medicine and blaming his patients for it.

Aside from that little rant - the health insurance/care system is pretty messed up and I think that everyone had good points about why or why not. I don’t really know any of the answers, but I certainly don’t want to be blamed solely for the fact that I can’t always afford to go to the doctor or buy the prescriptions they provide me.

That’s not to say that there aren’t frivolous malpractice suite; there certainly are, but most never make it to trial, and many are dismissed on preliminary motions.

But there are several studies that have shown that even where tort reform has been enacted, such as California, malpractice insurance rates have either not dropped, or have by a very small percentage and then crept back up again.

Other studies have demonstrated that what the insurance industry fears most–very large damage awards–are real but infrequent and many can be traced to a small number of doctors who have had multiple malpractice suits and who have rarely been disciplined by state medical boards. This is one area that gets scant attention in the debate: if state boards would do a better job of investigating complaints and taking action against the few doctors that are practicing bad medicine, there would be fewer large damage awards.

But the bottom line is that insurance companies make a great deal of money out of large premiums and have had little to no incentive to reduce them.

Unfortunately, there is actual malpractice out there, and patients that are harmed should have a process of redress.

And, docjoe999, with the attitude you seem to have for your patients, you might want to think about getting into another line of work…maybe auto mechanic. You want to be well-paid and well-respected but your post evidences nothing but contempt for those who you think should pay you lavishly and shower you with praise and respect. With that attitude toward medicine and your patients, it’s no wonder that, as your post seems to imply, you’ve been in court more than you’d like.

You could have talked with your patients, give them the choice, cheap drug or expensive drug with less side effects. Then they get what they want: the side effects might not be worth 10 bucks to some. It sounded from your post like you never considered they might not want you to make that choice for them. Parental doctors is an old part of medical culture that needs changing.

Supply and demand. We need more doctors so competition gets to work.

That’s really what it boils down to on what’s causing health care costs to rise. However, the government shouldn’t be in the health care business category (whether politicians are or not is another story…), and the hospitals requiring freebies should be subsidized by said government. Its good that good doctors are paid, and that people should pay them to avoid them being ‘bought’, but how well would the average citizen be able to pay a doctor compared to a pharmaceutical company?

That said, “Sicko” is an interesting movie. =)

I also agree that people who file frivilous law suits impact the practise of medicine way too much.

I also think that patients who are harmed by misdiagnoses and surgical errors must have the right to recourse - bad doctors and inept technicians have to be excised from the system at some point.

And while I also agree that healthcare costs are very high, I certainly want god medical care when I need it! I’m grateful that I can afford health insurance!

The real tragedy is that during the last six years the number of uninsured ***children*** in the United States has increased by 30 percent. There’s certainly something very wrong with our leadership and elected officials if that cannot be reversed - and soon!

Another real tragedy is the medical debacle that veterans face on a daily basis: they put their lives on the line in the service of our country and deserve far better than they’ve gotten during the last 20 years. A verteran injured on the battlefield should have the ability to walk into *ANY* hospital and get *ANY* care he or she requires. The red tape vets have to go through is ghastly - and unwarranted. Getting pre-approval for a surgical procedure with any HMO is a walk in the park compared to what these folks have to go through. It’s a stinking dirty shame that vets are treated this way. Dirty. Stinking. Shame.