Pete's BLOG-Day 26,418. What should be done about America's medical mess.

Today is Monday, March 18, 2013. My stats today: 10 minutes of yoga, 10 minutes of lifting weights and 45 minutes of walking = 2.5 miles for a March total of 33.5 miles. My weight was 160.2 pounds.

QUOTE for today: "Good judgment comes from the experiences you get from bad judgment."

My THOUGHTS today are on my last post on the U.S. medical system. According to Steven Brill, the author, here are his suggestions for getting out of this mess.

- Start Medicare at a younger age.
- Control prescription drug prices.
- Tax hospital profits at 75% and regulate their prices.
- Reduce the over ordering of tests and other procedures.
- Spending on outpatient clinics and labs owned by doctors could be cut by a third by regulating fees or taxing profits.
- Tighten antitrust laws related to hospitals to keep them from becoming so dominant in a region that insurance companies are helpless in negotiating prices with them.
- Have a tax surcharge on all nondoctor hospital salaries that exceed $750,000.
- We should outlaw the chargemaster.
-  We should amend patent laws so that makers of wonder drugs would be limited in how they can exploit the monopoly our patent laws give them.
- We should tighten what Medicare pays for CT and MRI tests a lot more and even cap what insurance companies can pay for them.
- Reform the medical malpractice laws.
- Limit administer salaries at hospitals to 5-6 times what the lowest paid licensed physician gets for caring for patients there.
-Require drug companies to include a prominent, plain-English notice of the gross profit margin on the packaging of each drug, as well as the salary of the parent company's CEO.

His final words were: Over the past few decades, we've enriched the labs, drug companies, medical device makers, hospital administrators and purveyors of CT scans, MRIs, canes and wheelchairs. We've created an island for these people in an economy that is suffering under the weight of the riches those on the island extract. We've allowed those on the island and their lobbyists and allies to control the debate, diverting us from what a health care economist at Johns Hopkins says is the obvious and only issue: "All the prices are too damn high."

What do you think the odds are of any of these ever happening? Don't bet the farm on it?  The medical industry (doctors, hospitals, medical device makers, drug companies_, etc.) spend more on lobbying than any other industry, including the military-industrial complex.