tinokid
A minimum wage fast food worker is constantly observed by a phalanx of cameras that will incriminate her should she attempt to steal five dollars from the till, but a surgeon in an operating room performs an infinitely more consequential task with nary a recording device in sight. Why? The immense trust and responsibility invested by society in medical doctors.
There is a common misconception that a medical license is basically just a reward for a demonstration of technical mastery, much as a developer job flows from passing a coding interview. But in reality the technical aspect is only secondary; the primary purpose of all those years of training is to ensure that the student understands the fullness of the obligations associated with the profession and is properly disposed to accept them.
In a case like this, the person understood and accepted those grave obligations, as well as all the privileges that came with them, only to toss them out the window when the opportunity arose to make a few extra dollars. That is what is being punished here. Four years is hardly too long, or cruelly retributive.
It is the abuse of a position of trust that aggravates this crime relative to that of a simple outlaw street dealer.
Commenters who are concerned with the effect on the convict's reputation and future employability are simply not in touch with reality....this was a grave breach of the basic ethics of the medical profession and seriously harmed the innocent patients involved. There is no return to work after something like this...any more than with a scientist who falsifies data, a teacher who sleeps with minor students, a lawyer who steals from escrow, etc.
I find it highly disturbing that there is more discussion in this thread as to the effect on the doctor's return on investment from his medical degree rather than on the individuals who bodies were damaged by someone they were supposed to be able to trust.
That said, insurers have better insight into this than almost anyone else. If they see a young person with almost no medical claims go in for an elective foot surgery with Doctor Lexus, and then all of a sudden that person is attending physical therapy and filling opioid prescriptions every month, that's a bad sign. If it happens more than once, insurers should feel empowered to go ahead and shut the good doctor down. But this does not happen.
And lung cancer is not the only cancer caused by smoking.
In any case, cancer death rates and changes in risk factors do not speak directly to the claim about treatment effectiveness. If you are diagnosed with cancer, you are basically every bit as f'ed today as you were 50 years ago, except in the special case that your cancer happens to be one of those that never would have been noticed back then.
Hmmm... Apply a 25 year lag. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/figures/m4843a2f1....
>PS: Stomach cancer is flat out much less common because we understand a major cause now. Cervical cancer rates will similarly drop from the HPV vaccine.
Yes...lots of progress in infectious disease treatment, very little with cancer treatment.
Treating, for example, thyroid or prostate cancers that would not have killed the person improves cancer survival statistics but nothing else.
I think it's naive to assume the 16.5%-of-GDP octopus we've created wouldn't figure out a way to profit from the removal of all regulations.
No. These rates are affected by more screening procedures. Some nipped a potentially fatal cancer in the bud, others just found and removed something that wouldn't have killed the person.
To first order there is no change in the effectiveness of cancer treatment as compared to 50 years ago.
Not only should a provider be legally prohibited from trying to collect payment for unnecessary treatment, they should be held responsible for complications. Even unnecessary x-rays can cause cancer.
For all the stories about heartless insurance companies denying to pay for things, perhaps they should actually be more strict. As in, refuse to pay for anything unless there is 1) rock-solid (i.e. double-blind, placebo-controlled) evidence that it helps 2) for a specific, objectively verifiable indication 3) when provided by a doctor whose track record is demonstrably non-inferior to that of other practitioners. But for all three of those things, no $.
I would be interested in buying insurance like that.
Was this written before the Wells Fargo scandal came to light?
Hard to be optimistic when the "silver lining" is that people who were once employed to do necessary work have since been reassigned to trawl for opportunities to make easy money at the expense of the gullible and vulnerable.
Sadly this appears to be yet another theme in technological advancement--the proliferation of scams. Just look at how much social media advertising comes from multi-level marketing schemes.
They should have just let the market work and the banks go under.
It would have been a financial loss but a moral victory. An important lesson about carefully choosing who you trust.
And then I saw this comment: "Thats weird. I have a mastercard and was charged twice. So how is it Visas fault."
I must have missed where you said that. You said I was likely mistaking ACH for wire transfer because mine were happening that fast.
The point stands that "inherent delays" in the ACH system are negligible, on the order of hours.
I reacted strongly to the person claiming otherwise because it was presented as an excuse for people not having access to their money quickly. If people are being told they can't get their money because of "ACH delays", "check is in the mail", "clogged tubes", or whatever, they should not be afraid to call BS!
And using ACH delays as an excuse for why people can't get money out of Bitcoin quickly-- the original context of this thread-- is completely disingenuous.
Ask anyone on the street when they can get the money from their paycheck direct deposit. Unless they just opened their account, they are not waiting days.
But yes please provide those "technical details" whenever you have a chance.
https://www.frbservices.org/assets/financial-services/ach/09...
Yes there are some dispute/reversal windows that I have never had experience with, but if you are just transferring money between your own accounts this should not be a serious issue.
Also, from that pool of drugs you're referring to, we've eliminated a number of things that had strong effects but whose side-effects were later found after careful study to not outweigh the benefits.
There is a similar effect from carefully studying devices/surgical interventions--not so much a raft of "new innovations" but rather the culling of a lot of things that were overused or actually harmful. Huge cost savings, big improvements in population health & lots of gored oxen.
It is among the worst specialties as far as being based on tradition/folklore/marketing. When you see one of their own being injured this badly you realize how wholeheartedly they buy into their own BS about "new innovations" that can "help" people.
The problem is that it is so absolutist that it is easy to find holes and internal inconsistencies in its story. Hence it can scarcely perform its function--namely, to provide a narrative that establishes the legitimacy of the ruling class--for very long.
Look only at the examples given in the article.
>The most effective way to rile the meritocrats is to attack their faith in expertise: Lord Turnbull, a former Cabinet secretary, has said that Brexiteers’ willingness to question current Treasury forecasts of the impact of Brexit was reminiscent of pre-war Nazi Germany.
Of course there is nothing wrongheaded about contesting the findings of government economic forecasts--governments produce such forecasts out of necessity, not because they exemplify any paragon of scientific truth. Reasonable people often disagree about them.
>The easiest way to rile the populists is to imply that their attachment to symbols of national identity, such as blue passports or the Cross of St George, is a sign of low intelligence.
This is so absurd it barely needs any mention. Nation-states have existed for a long time, and preference for their symbols has nothing to do with intelligence or lack thereof.
So you have a dissident group making a claim about a point of fact, and the soi-disant intellectually superior group responding with an ad hominem that slurs vasts swaths of the population. This is not a sustainable situation.
An apology doesn't itself assuage a guilty conscience, it is just an acknowledgement of the debt created by the wrong. A fake apology may be worse than saying nothing, but the prevalence of fake apologies is no excuse not to do the right thing.
Say you were texting and killed a kid crossing the street. You don't know his family and the mother will not accept your apology. Perhaps she even goes on TV crying about the person who killed her baby.
There are quite many cowardly individuals in America who would use legal reasons as an excuse not to apologize in a situation like that, and probably even a handful who would double down on this pathology and tell themselves the woman is "looking for drama". This is sad.
>There are very few scenarios now where the consumer benefits from saying "no" or "less" to their doctors.
is totally off base. The primary benefit to saying "no" is avoiding damage to your health from dangerous and unnecessary treatments that American doctors have a financial incentive to sell. People in the U.S. have their life expectancy reduced every day because we, almost uniquely among developed countries, have removed nearly all limits on the cultural acceptability of medical professionals and the medical industry as a whole treating patients as sales marks rather than patients. If you would like to experience this firsthand, respond to any AdWords or TV advertisement for a medical treatment. The sleaze is limitless.
>They tend to gloss over who actually decides when a procedure isn't worth it.
Salaried civil servants with advanced degrees who have an interest in cutting through BS to protect the health of the country. If you want to reduce people like Frances Kelsey to "unelected government officials" be my guest, but you're only showing how naive you are.