Apparently, it isn't the doctor's or hospital's responsibility to diagnose health issues

[daredtowork]

81. I agree on Big Pharma, but I also think we need to look at the AMA and medical education

Since doctors are not unionized, they - like lawyers - have taken very strategic views of controlling supply-and-demand through education, controlling the gateways to their expertise (re: you must pay for the doctor's appt. before getting the prescription...), and packaging their expertise in ways that shift the maximum amount of income to themselves.

I don't want to simply bash the profession. A lot of doctors go into healthcare to help people. Successful doctors give people employment by staffing large offices or creating larger health care centers that centralize services in a way that are more convenient for patients. Thanks to the professional structures in place, doctors might suffer a lot to get to where they are. They take on heavy loan debt, and General Practitioners are paid much less than specialists. The costs of insurance do create an underlying drag on the whole industry.

Also, history shows that where workers haven't unionized, professional organizations are the way to go to protect their interests.

However, there is medical industry as a whole seems to be sucking far too much money out out of everyone's pockets, and the worst part of it is a lot of the costs are incomprehensible because subsidizing one thing is shifted around to inflating another. Patients get caught between medical providers and insurance companies trying to out-maneuver each other, and they are baffled by the big bills in between. This cost-payment structure is wrong in the first place.

Health care is for the people who need care, not for stockholders. We need to restructure the system around that, and the only way to do that is to take a more "socialized" view of medicine. We need to support university R&D (and give students scholarships in the process) - rather than relying on the "private sector" to "find cures". We need to flood the system with students. Then we need to provide those students with jobs (just not Celebrity CEO Paying Jobs) when they graduate so they won't decide that going into healthcare sucks. Perhaps we could do a national insurance fund for private practice, so doctors would still be responsible for major medical mistakes, but they wouldn't be a cash cow for private insurance in the mean time. We need to slowly build a Public Option until it is such the obvious and efficient way to deliver medical care that it converts into universal medical care.

Anyway a sympathize greatly with your struggles right now. I'm babbling on because it makes me think of the improvements that could be made.