http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=172
WELL worth the read! Here's a clip from it:
"Another factor driving up costs and contributing to poor quality care is the medical cartel. A cartel exists when one group works together to set prices and control all steps in the production and distribution of a commodity or service. Through licensing and other laws enacted in the early part of the 20th century, one group, the American Medical Association, controls how many medical schools exist, how many students enroll, what is taught in the schools, the availability of hospital residencies, and, indirectly through licensing laws, who will get jobs in medicine. It would be difficult to find an industry in America that is more tightly controlled by one group or union.
Alternative therapies and practitioners have been ruthlessly suppressed, their proponents often being run out of the country. Thousands of Americans flee each year to Mexico and Europe to obtain products and therapies banned in the United States but in use for as many as 50 years elsewhere.
The kingpin of the cartel is the restrictive state-medical licensing laws, passed in the early part of the 20th century. Previously, there were no licenses and the health-care system worked well. However, one group of physicians, the allopaths or drug doctors, felt they were not making enough money. The AMA, formed in 1847, was quite candid about its intentions. It sought vigorously to reduce the supply of doctors by eliminating the competition and controlling the number of medical graduates. With backing from the Carnegie Foundation and the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, the AMA was quite successful. Because of its efforts, the number of healing schools fell from 140 in 1900 to 77 in 1940.
The purpose of a cartel is to improve the income of its members. From this perspective, American health care is a resounding success. John C. Goodman and Gerald L. Musgrave, in their excellent book Patient Power, explain that "the AMA endorsed the idea of a medical cartel and made participation in it ethically mandatory."
Posts
Since 2006, I've referred to our problem as the Medical-Pharmaceutical-Chemical Cartel. Having grown up inside the Medical Educational System--I watched my father the Medical Doctor and Professor of Medicine get more and more upset with his union, bemoan that the "really good physicians who want to practice medicine and heal people" were leaving the country.
ReplyDeleteI myself, got my "permanently gone" sight back after 5.5 years during treatment in a Mexican clinic because I could not get ALL the treatments I got there in the USA, and if they HAD been available here, I could never have afforded it!