Re: The end is in sight

Joel Koltner wrote:
"Richard the Dreaded Libertarian" <freedom_guy@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
[...]
If, when Latisha took little Mobutu to the ER for a skinned knee or so,
If they billed her the three grand or so, she might be motivated to invest
in a first-aid kit and learn how to use it.

In a more sensible world, the triage nurse at the ER would tell Latisha, "look, there doesn't appear to be any problem here -- you might go home, clean it up and cover it with gauze, and it'll be fine; we'd do the same thing but it's just going to cost you more money." In the real world, this doesn't happen due to liability concerns -- if it turns out the nurse is wrong, and Mobutu's knee gets infected and he eventually loses his leg, guess who's going to have to pay millions of dollars? There's a non-negligible component of U.S. health care that can be directly attributed to "defensive medicine" like this.

I'm told that US doctors routinely shotgun-test patients with expensive diagnostics for exactly this reason.

--
W
. | ,. w , "Some people are alive only because
\|/ \|/ it is illegal to kill them." Perna condita delenda est
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