Yea, this doesn't support your position at all that medical school costs are a primary driver of overall US medical costs. Total physician/clinical spending represents 20.3% of all healthcare spending first off, so it is a small portion of the overall. Second, the articles primary contention is that it drives students into specialization? There are a host of reasons why physicians go into specialization, it isn't nearly as much about money for the last 10-15 years. Specialist compensation has fallen off a cliff while basic medicine like IM has seen huge jumps. This isn't the 80's and 90's where neuro/CT surgeons were making 10x their peers. A neurosurgeon is now doing ~800k and a hospitalist is easy north of 400k.
Further, their reimbursement isn't dictated by their medical school costs, Medicare (the primary driver of reimbursement by CPT) doesn't care at the RUC level.
That model only applies to those not on medicaid/ACA plans. ~Half the country gets to skip that and binge on whatever they want healthcare related.
All health insurance plans have a max out of pocket expense as well as no cap on care. So the days of medically driven bankruptcy are long gone. You don't forego surgery in France or the UK, it is simply not made available to you are you get to wait for an extremely long time to get it. Look up the statistics for joint replacements in the UK. There is a reason they are far less prevalent, the NHS doesn't spend $20k to replace the hip in an elderly person, they aren't worth it.
What you call "weasel definitions" are actually just definitions. I provided the hard data to show the US per capita welfare spending is top 10 in the world and higher than most major EU nations.
Sounds like someone was a Comms major, figures.
Ok, so your argument then is that a 4 year comms degree is valuable because they have all the skills you have departing high school? Algebra? Are you kidding me? I did that in 7th and 8th grade. If there were no dispute or debate here then there wouldn't be a question of wages and the cost of university. If there were a value there there would be a whiner next to it.
How about everyone who has a college loan balance over 40 years old. That's a pretty solid indicator of people who F'd up with their education and financial management.
This was in specific rebuttal to your argument that Medicaid is only available to the poor, I pointed out it was expanded to 4x the poverty level based on household size. You don't understand the notion that the US has a generous social system? That's odd, I gave you the figures showing we were 10th in the world in per capita social spending. That was #10 including some countries that were tiny, compared to peers we were ~top 5.
No, they drop a kid to do it.
www.reuters.com
www.cnbc.com
apnews.com
