Reply #61: I'm more in favor of a "two tier" system sort of like UK has, [View All]

with government payor service (NHS) available to all but also some private incentive care available also.

I spent most of my career as a salaried physician with the U.S. Gov't delivering "socialized" gov't. care. The system and care were okay. There were definitely advantages to that system over the private system I am in now, but also definitely advantages to the private system over that.

While there are certainly a lot of errors made in U.S. medicine, do you have any data to back up that there are "more made now than ever before", implying that you have some basis for comparison? I can certainly say that there were quite a lot of errors made in the government system I worked in also, and they were not always identified or addressed.

The most prominent recent data on the topic is the Institute of Medicine's report from 1999. Basically IOM's position is that the majority of the preventable errors were "systems problems" and not necessarily individual malfeasance. (The way our court system deals with it). I do not believe that they prescribed socialized medicine as a cure for medical error. There was recognition that our system of medical litigation discourages physicians from self-identifying errors, and at least some interest was expressed in a "no-fault" type of insurance where doctors would presumably be more likely to report error without sacrificing their career and finances on the pyre of malpractice court. There is a definite disincentive to a lot of these disclosures under our current system of malpractice.

I'm not exonerating doctors for being dishonest here, or saying people shouldn't be allowed to sue. But in the punitive world of medical malpractice all complications and/or error are ascribed to individual wrongdoing/evil. It's not a system conducive to the best communications between doctors and patients. In otherwords, in some cases, doctors have to overcome a natural instinct for self preservation to be fully honest with their patients. If the system didn't set up a huge internal conflict like this, honesty and communications would be better.

The arguments in favor of a socialized type system have much more to do with universal access and affordability. I think the "medical errors" argument is a poor one to use for that particular debate.