Health care with other people's money- what could be wrong with that?

Paying for health care with other people's money-what could possibly go wrong?

Dr. Paul Hsieh answers the question posed in the title in a commentary in Forbes. See here.

He outlines four important ominous consequences of basing health care on spending other people's money.

  This excellent article should be read in its entirety but let me briefly  comment on the first in the list.

"Doctors will be increasingly expected to save money for the system  ."

This is already happening.Various medical professional organizations are re-writing traditional medical ethics, pushing the fiduciary duty of the physician to the patients into the memory hole and substituting the bogus concept of the physician as a steward of society's medical resources which at least one physician's organization (the ABIM Foundation) has strangely linked to social justice. I have ranted about this before but the caravan rolls on and increasingly  the rhetoric  in various medical forums emphasizes saving money for the system. It seems that the medical professional elite would have us believe that the road to social justice is for physicians to follow guidelines, which may not be designed for patient benefit alone but also for cost containment for the third party payers.

The medicine of the collective is replacing the medicine of the individual. This is being promoted in part by what I have called the progressive medical elite who, to a frightening degree, seem to occupy the leadership positions in many influential medical organizations . Their unspoken mantra is that medical care is too complex and too important to be left to the individual patient and his physician. Wise leaders with ideas need to be in charge. Of course, it is promoted by the third party payers, private and public, who may well consider the medical professional  elite in this ethical paradigm shift as useful idiots.

 The third party payers and the professional medical elite have attempted to turn traditional medical ethics around so that the fiduciary duty to the patient is somehow replaced by an ethical duty to save money and the whole flim-flam activity is sprinkled with non sequiturs  about social justice. Social justice is typically taken to mean redistribution and if cost to the system is reduced it is difficult to see wherein the redistribution lies if everyone gets less.Everyone, of course, except the third party payers.

  In regard to private property the owners have the incentive to be a "good steward" of their resources.You have to ask what is the incentive of physicians to act as stewards of a mythical  collectively owned resource? If everyone owes it , no one owns it and no one has the incentive to care for it.

The notion of "the system" [in regard to medical care] while a rhetorically useful notion for a certain agenda, is basically fallaciously  aggregating elements that do not belong together. In short, there is no system for health care just as there is no car delivery system or a home building system. It makes no sense to speak of the situation in which someone buys a new car as a cost to the car supply system or a person buying a home as a cost to the home supply system.All of these are transactions in which there are buyers and sellers and exchanges take  place.Mr Jones gets a CT  of  the abdomen.. This is not a cost to any system. It is a cost to Jones and/or his insurance company while to the providers of care it is a payment. One person's cost is another person's income.To call this a cost to a system is nonsense.Unless all the health care is provided, operated and owned by  a single entity, usually the government., then the services provided  could be considered  a cost to the system.

Who gains from acceptance of this bogus notion of physicians as stewards of some mythical collectively owned medical resources? The third party payers for whom the gain is obvious and the medical elite progressives who stand to gain from their position of prestige  as experts and rule makers  and the rest of us, real physicians and patients,  lose.

So, in summary there is no medical care system to which a cost is charged with every medical care transaction and secondly the physician as steward concept is completely contradictory to the traditional role of the physician as the fiduciary agent of the patient .