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Tuesday, March 24, 2009

The other side of the health Care "debate"

As for as the main stream medical journals (JAMA, NEJM, Annals Internal Medicine) the health care issue is largely already decided with certain conclusions reached and as such now exist beyond debate or refutation. The conclusions are :U.S. health care costs too much, many folks are "denied" access to care and the care is of inferior quality to that received in the other developed countries.

There are cogent arguments to the contrary and those can be found here.

The authors include John Goodman , a Phd in Economics and a prolific author on the subject of health care economics but unlike Uwe Reinhardt is rarely quoted in the big three journals mentioned above. (It seems to help to be on the board of a managed care company to get quoted in JAMA).

Another author is Dr. Robert M Sade. I first heard of Dr. Sade when he published a NEJM article in support of the proposition that health care is not a right. The type of fire storm that his article elicited was not unexpected and included a blistering admonition from the editor of the journal. Dr. Sade, a trained heart surgeon, later left practice and has devoted some of his energies to biomedical ethics and health policy and organ transplantation issues.

Dr. Wes gives his views on the "broken health care system" here.

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