Quote Originally Posted by zookeeper View Post
The CYA has been in place for years and something else that increased the number of testing ordered was doctor-owned hospitals. They are/were routinely referring patients to the hospital X-Ray room, or whatever, while owning a part of the hospital. Obamacare outlaws such chicanery as doctors must divest themselves of hospital ownership by a certain date.

I agree about Canada as well. The people living in Canada seem to like it very much and every system has its horror stories. It would take some real whoppers to beat the stories that come out of our own rotten for-profit system. It will take removing the insurance companies out of the system completely to ever really fix our health care system.
So every system has horror stories, but our for-profit system is inherently "rotten" because of the same kinds of "whoppers?" Can't have it both ways.

The hyperbole coming from both sides of this is part of the reason we are exactly where we are. Canada isn't a panacea, the US isn't a panacea, but there's something to be said that, for several decades, the US was where people came from all over the world for medical procedures not available anywhere else. This idea that the US system is or always was this wretched mass of failure is as ludicrous as the claims of "death panels" under Obamacare, which as much as I loathed (and still loathe) Obamacare, I knew wasn't true.

Doctor-owned hospitals may have their drawbacks, but for many such organizations they were a way to consolidate resources, reduce bureaucracy, and pass savings on to patients. My son had two ENT procedures done on an outpatient basis at a doctor-owned surgical hospital for a fraction of what those procedures would have cost through a conventional surgical/hospital setup. That Obamacare makes them illegal speaks more to Obama's broader economic objectives than to his preoccupation with health care in particular.