Companies downsizing hours to avoid Obama Care

[archibaldcrane]

Obviously, assuming a profit motive, a doc will fill his schedule with the highest paying patients possible.

That's simple competition, and the cadillac-insured are going to stick to the top-tier docs. Those who can't fill their schedule with cadillac-insured ballers have to lower their threshold of acceptable compensation.

[Plow]

You can't buy health care wholesale.

I'd just like to point out this is a statement by one of the people arguing that there's nothing in obamacare that will reduce costs, and this is a statement made AFTER I've linked him to extensive lists of what's actually in it.


Just sayin.

[Byrthnoth]

Crank out more doctors and they will no longer be required to pull 48 hour shifts in med school. Increased supply of service will decrease the cost of care. As far as quality of care, I think most doctors would agree that the current training environment sucks anyway. They would not agree that their job could generally be done better by a database/program that takes all the data and shits out a diagnosis, bur they would be wrong. Simply making a program to handle diagnoses for the nurses would be another solution. Non-surgeons are technicians of the human body, but they are paid like engineers.

Pay surgeons well. Pay software engineers instead of doctors. Train more nurses. Costs go down and care quality goes up.

[Waraji]

But, please if you would be so kind, explain to my why the companies that run said industry would give a shit about costs going down? Wouldn't that just mean less profit, or are you suggesting that they'll make more profit while still employing more.

[Byrthnoth]

Apart from generally making the system more efficient, this opens the door for the government to push costs down. Replace doctors with PAs/Nurses and squeeze the system a little.

[kuronosan]

Apart from generally making the system more efficient, this opens the door for the government to push costs down. Replace doctors with PAs/Nurses and squeeze the system a little.

God damn you're stupid.

[Byrthnoth]

Medical diagnosis is a skill that requires an encyclopedic knowledge of signs/symptoms and the knowledge of how the probability of that specific constellation of signs/symptoms relates to any given ailment. This is a type of problem that computers are incredibly good at solving. It's only a matter of time until we have enough data that doctors are unnecessary for anything more than reading these signs/symptoms and quantifying them for the computer. If you remove the diagnosis component, medical school takes much less time and training to be a doctor takes much less experience.

Doctors are on the way out. The only question is how long it will take.

[ringthree]

Medical diagnosis is a skill that requires an encyclopedic knowledge of signs/symptoms and the knowledge of how the probability of that specific constellation of signs/symptoms relates to any given ailment. This is a type of problem that computers are incredibly good at solving. It's only a matter of time until we have enough data that doctors are unnecessary for anything more than reading these signs/symptoms and quantifying them for the computer. If you remove the diagnosis component, medical school takes much less time and training to be a doctor takes much less experience.

Doctors are on the way out. The only question is how long it will take.

Doctors are for surgery, nurses are way better than doctors in pretty much everything else.

[kuronosan]

Sorry, I disagree completely. Although logically you're correct, taking the human element out of something like that could have potentially fatal consequences for the patient. Not that I don't think an algorithm could not do it faster but there is a reason we shouldn't be relying so heavily on technology to do everything and that is programming limitations.

[Kalmado]

Even "good" insurance blows anymore anyways. My wife spent 4 days in the hospital with a severe kidney infection 2 months ago. Didn't need surgery. She has what looked like a really good plan through her work with Blue Cross Blue Shield. We are still getting random bills in the mail from the hospital, anestesia clinic, radiology clinic, the infection doctors office, etc etc. It just doesn't stop. The only thing we've received in the mail stating what we're even getting charged for is written in medical coding blarg it's impossible to decipher. After requesting a copy of the charges in common english from the bitch billing clerk, we got another paper with more coding and no clear answer as to what we're getting charged for.

Take me back to 2002 when I had the cheap insurance at work and I had a surgery and the only thing I had to pay for was a $20 doctor copay.

[MF Perm tha Fineass]

I'd just like to point out this is a statement by one of the people arguing that there's nothing in obamacare that will reduce costs, and this is a statement made AFTER I've linked him to extensive lists of what's actually in it.


Just sayin.

You're not this retarded are you? Please tell me you're not this stupid. I mean past experiences should lead me to not even give you the benefit of the doubt, but pls don't be this stupid.

Opening the market for health insurance and making it more accessible does nothing to lower the cost of actual care. Just as you accuse someone of not paying attention to your link ( a fucking thread in reddit of all things ), you should pay attention to what others are posting. The shit that really would have made a different in lowering the COSTS OF TREATMENT AND CARE was taken out of the bill.

No only did you miss the analogy, you tried to understand the analogy when you can't even comprehend what the analogy is relating to. What in the actual fuck, bro.

[Kryssan]

Medical diagnosis is a skill that requires an encyclopedic knowledge of signs/symptoms and the knowledge of how the probability of that specific constellation of signs/symptoms relates to any given ailment. This is a type of problem that computers are incredibly good at solving. It's only a matter of time until we have enough data that doctors are unnecessary for anything more than reading these signs/symptoms and quantifying them for the computer. If you remove the diagnosis component, medical school takes much less time and training to be a doctor takes much less experience.

Doctors are on the way out. The only question is how long it will take.

Sorry, I disagree completely. Although logically you're correct, taking the human element out of something like that could have potentially fatal consequences for the patient. Not that I don't think an algorithm could not do it faster but there is a reason we shouldn't be relying so heavily on technology to do everything and that is programming limitations.

This street goes two ways though. The best solution would be to find a happy medium between human and computer interrelation, but history says that is unlikely:

Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft... and the only one that can be mass-produced with unskilled labor.

Wernher von Braun

This is a mentality shared with a lot of the 'greats' from the same timeframe - that humans will invariably be better at the "important decisions" than computers - and by those today who view our technology as the means to humanity's dystopic futures. But we cannot forget that it was also unheeded computers that warned the human operators they were doing something catastrophic at Chernobyl, Unit 4.

My personal argument would be to keep the machines, to let them have a higher role in control and direction; but to keep the training of those 'in charge' of said machines to the previous level before the machines. Too often I've found in my experience that the inclusion of technology is an excuse for the exclusion of knowledge. The trade-off that is time / money. "Because the machine can do it, we don't have to know how its done" mentality. If you don't yourself know how it is done / how the machine is accomplishing it, how can you be expected to provide a satisfactory review of the machine's results?

As we continually move into a world where decisions need to be made on planes measured in picometers and times measured in picoseconds, or smaller, computers are a veritable necessity. Humans aren't "necessary" in terms of what our robots are doing, because we're either physically unable to duplicate their process ourselves or unable to do it in a time-lapse that is satisfactory; that does not mean we couldn't, or shouldn't, still provide for human supervision to the degree that it is possible to provide. Yet, that also needs to be tempered with the fact that the computer exists for a reason, and that it can be right, too.

[Blubbartron]

Sorry, I disagree completely. Although logically you're correct, taking the human element out of something like that could have potentially fatal consequences for the patient. Not that I don't think an algorithm could not do it faster but there is a reason we shouldn't be relying so heavily on technology to do everything and that is programming limitations.

The human element can't be taken out of the subjective side of treatment/diagnosis (where does it hurt, how bad does it hurt, does anything "feel wrong"), but everything that can be quantified (lab results, previous diagnoses, family history, genetic sequencing, etc) could and should be put into a computer to help determine the best course of action. Eventually we'll get the subjective side ironed out too, but I imagine it'll more likely be some kind of scan to quantify the electric signals in the body/brain instead of asking the patient how they feel (which ironically will remove the subjectivity).

Things are going to get wild in the next decade or two as more hospitals are sharing data. Doing clinical trials can be difficult due to the rareness of diseases/newly identified syndromes, but when you can compile the information from hundreds of hospitals and sift it down to just the types of patients you care about, you can publish papers and create effective new treatment options just from data that exists *currently*. It'll be even better when those hospitals start sharing their Clinical Informatics usage/setup and the percentages of positive outcomes related to different treatments. Mind you, this process would be infinitely faster if we had a national health system with a single database for patient records.

At any rate, what programming limitations are you referring to? There really aren't any serious limitations beyond the hardware wall that we're hitting and still working on good ways to circumvent. Even then, the fact that hardware isn't really going to get faster unless we make a major breakthrough just means that processing could take longer, but there are people creating ingenious solutions to that problem every day (see "Big Data").

[hey]

Sorry, I disagree completely. Although logically you're correct, taking the human element out of something like that could have potentially fatal consequences for the patient. Not that I don't think an algorithm could not do it faster but there is a reason we shouldn't be relying so heavily on technology to do everything and that is programming limitations.

I don't think he was suggesting automating the entire process from diagnosis to treatment.

[D44kpunk]

"free market"

"obama care"

[kuronosan]

I don't think he was suggesting automating the entire process from diagnosis to treatment.

Sort of sounded as though he was saying doctors are obsolete when they aren't. And I'm still laughing at the suggestion that nurses are better diagnosticians.

[Byrthnoth]

And I'm still laughing at the suggestion that nurses are better diagnosticians.

No one said that one either. The computer is a better diagnostician if it has someone that can quantify and input the signs/symptoms properly. The nurses and physician's assistants are capable of quantifying the signs/symptoms. A nurse with a minimal level of competence and this hypothetical doctor-program are a pair of hands short of being better than a nurse and a doctor. You don't always need the extra pair of hands.

[tyven]

R U SAYING WEB MD SHOULD REPLACE ALL OF THE DOKTORS?

[kuronosan]

MOAR LEIK I'M CONFUSED AZ 2 WUT DEY SAY LOL

[Kalmado]

It's like....a sign of the future.....