Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema:
> These perceptions are accurate enough, but remember they are dated and
> becoming irrelevant.
> ...
> Doctors increasingly are proletarianized. This is the website for an
> organizing committee at a major hospital. These are not interns and
> residents either.
>
> http://www.4prn.org/montefiore/attendings.html
>
> There is much to criticize about medicine, and some of the examples you
> cited continue to be accurate, but the notion of the profiteering
> physician is becoming an anachronism.
I've heard about this, but I haven't seen it. The last time I visited a doctor, I had to wait two or three hours (a charge, and an important one for people who have to work), I got five minutes of attention, and was charged two or three hundred dollars. A friend of mine, who had a few warts removed, work taking less than a minute, was billed $1250. The physicians themselves may not be receiving the money, but somebody is, and the proportion of the GDP which is poured into the medical system for mediocre results its a subject of scandal among those who bother to know about it. Whatever doctors are getting, the system is still subject to the laws of capitalism, one of the first of which is short- term profit first, and the Devil take the hindmost. Unions can definitely live with this as long as they can get a piece of the action; they're liberal institutions, that is, groups of people who combine for their own economic advantage. Thus I don't anticipate that proletarianization will necessarily enlighten the profession, especially given the love of orthodoxy rampant in the more traditional Left.
This sort of thing is going to make self-medication and gurus very popular, at least until people notice that alternative medicine is also subject to those same capitalist laws. Oddly, co-op HMOs, which would seem to be a partial answer to the problem, are practically nonexistent except in the state of Wisconsin, I believe. Maybe they're forbidden elsewhere?