Comments on: doctoring up the healthcare industry

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 20:49:29 +0000

The last few paragraphs of this article really upset me. Particularly “Ask yourself if you’d rather have your doctor focusing on how to add a few more dollars to his wallet or how to take the best care of you.” This implies that without Obama’s healthcare reform all doctors only care about money. Most people don’t realize that doctors spend 4+ years in undergraduate and graduate programs on degrees they will never be able to use, then pay $200,000+ over the next 4 years to attend medical school, and then spend another 4+ years getting paid ~$40,000 a year during residency. Then, after 12+ years and hundreds of thousands of dollars debt (don’t forget about interest on those loans), they finally get to be a doctor. Students and residents commonly work 80+ hours each week to see all of their patients. If you do the math, residents are getting paid somewhere around $9/hr or less while paying loans off after 8 years of school, don’t forget to take our taxes, malpractice insruance, health insurance, and medical supplies from that payrate. Also, getting into medical school is very hard, so undergraduate isn’t a huge party like it is for some people – grades are important.
Then articles like this come out and paint the picture that doctors are selfish and purposely let people get diabetes just so they can make an extra buck. No one seems to have a problem with actors, musicians, and athletes getting paid obscene amounts of money, but the doctors who are literally saving lives and have given up all the young years of their lives for this profession are just horrible people and the only way to save them is Obama’s healthcare reform. How rude and judgemental.

By: Steve

Steve — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 16:28:26 +0000

I would rather go back to the Monster bashing (which I think is a bit overdone)then turn this into another site for political activists to air their opionions. Cheezhead was a website about recruitment.

To the author Jennifer; some of us in the recruitment world have been reading this site prior to your arrival and I am dissapointed that you believe that this has anything to do with recruitment. Sure, a change in healthcare will effect the recruitment of nurses and doctors but that is not even the focus of your political rant.

By: Blake Carrington

Blake Carrington — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 15:37:10 +0000

I think people mix up the idea of real health care reform with more basic healthcare expansion. The ideas on the table now are taking existing structures like Medicare, and expanding their reach dramatically.

But they aren’t doing anything meaningful to reform the system in a way that would improve care or cut costs. Medicare is the poster child for out of control costs and minimal ability to measure effectiveness.

Why the Dems would start with Medicare as the model is beyond me.

Their mantra is that we pay too much and get too little, but then they come up with a plan that hugely expands the current system.

By: Steve

Steve — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 19:52:54 +0000

Obviously Healthcare reform willl have an impact on recruting and HR, but I am not sure what this post does. I thought this was a recruiting focused website. The good news is that at least it is a distraction from the usual Monster bashing.

By: Brett Hummel

Brett Hummel — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 18:32:11 +0000

I think universal health care like most human aspirations is a great idea. Unfortunately the plans that are being discussed in Washington are far from anything that we would ever want. Every major program that has been created as a panacea to solve a certain social problem has either failed or is on the verge of insolvency/bankruptcy: social security (insolvent for the next generation), medicare (costs are spiraling out of control), the war on drugs (failed), and the war on poverty/the Great Society (failed). With such a track record and billions if not trillions of dollars spent on these programs why would we add another one?

Additionally while many politicians claim that any new tax increases will only affect the rich in almost every case of major tax increases, politicians have eventually raised taxes on the middle and lower classes. Take the income tax for example, the tax started as only a 1% tax on the wealthiest individuals. Now that tax will stand at almost 40% for the highest income earners and even lower income earners feel its weight. Or the social security tax. It too started at 1% in 1937 and FDR said it would ensure that everyone had a ’safety net’. Today that tax stands at 6.2% of your income with your employer paying an additional 6.2% tax. Just imagine what you could do with an extra 12.4% of your income…you could probably afford health insurance.

This discussion on taxes doesn’t even begin to touch the fact that government will run multi-trillion dollar deficits over the next 10 years and this plan would add at least another trillion dollars to the deficit. Not to mention the fact that we are seeing a public plan in action in Massachusetts and the state is already having trouble paying for it after only a few years since its creation.

Government run plans are an incredibly bad idea. What is the next step? Does the government need to step into the our auto or life insurance markets, or tell us what home we can buy? I completely agree that health care and its cost need to change, but the answer is not the government. To solve the most pressing problem (covering the 30-40 million uninsured Americans), we should create a system like auto insurance. Everyone is required to buy a minimum level from a private company. This minimum insurance policy is a ‘disaster type’ policy whereby it has a decent size deductible and covers the person for catastrophic events like surgeries, cancer, getting hit by a bus, etc. For those at the poverty line the government can provide rebates or tax credits to ensure that they can pay. After this immediate problem is solved, then we can look at other ways to reduce cost.

By: maximus

maximus — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 16:41:13 +0000

So doctors opposed to socialized medicine are just greedy and value a few more dollars over patient health? Quite insulting if you ask me. I know many many excellent doctors horrified by this healthcare bill who care nothing about the money. They understand reality based on other countries. They will be forced to reduce care and eliminate procedures based on government mandates to reduce cost. One only need to look north to Canada to understand the nightmare we’re in for. Their sickest patients come to us for care, because they would have to wait months for treatment or serious and life-threatening illnesses otherwise.

By: Peggy McKee

Peggy McKee — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 15:59:29 +0000

I want the doctor to be motivated to be the best he can be and I find that a free capitalistic arena provides that incentive. Just like with recruiters. And I want to have access to the worlds best healthcare and any socialist system has fallen far short of this…I don’t see Obama as the one to fix this. And I suspect he knows that he will get the best healthcare no matter what he shoves off on us.