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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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You do realize that people in healthcare deal with the frustration of the job because they want to help people and are therefore constantly doing quality improvement projects and establishing metrics and other ways of tracking and addressing bad outcomes right? It's one of the major drivers of cost.

I have strong priors that "helping people" is exclusive to receiving "fair" compensation (read: as much as you can get). That's not helping. You're providing a service.

Sure, there are those that take lower wages to staff rural and low-income areas, but:

In fact we likely need to increase salaries (specifically: one of the biggest problems right now is that people will refuse to work in red states or rural areas, these jobs already offer higher salaries, sometimes as much as twice as much, but in some cases that's not enough).

Which is to say, physicians (as a total demographic) aren't looking to maximize impact.

[T]hey want to help people and are therefore constantly doing quality improvement projects and establishing metrics and other ways of tracking and addressing bad outcomes right? It's one of the major drivers of cost.

And defensive medicine is ultimately done for the patient's best interest too, I bet.

This all remains orthogonal to the original argument. You're not holding the smoking gun, you're just another member in the firing squad claiming you got the blank catridge.

So you don't think doctors are spending a ton of time and energy trying to improve patient care?