Reply #134: A simple question, Sir

[Nederland]

Do you concede that in posts 87, 95, and 105 you make no mean of the term medical savings account, nor do you describe any of its attributes?

To assist you, here are your posts:

Post #87: Your pocket-sized example has radical differences with our society, even beyond the tremendous difference in size. That is a place where people are fined for chewing gum, and where the level of government intrusion, intrusion happily accepted by the populace, verges on the bizarre. Things cannot simply be scaled up, in any case: a mouse the size of an elephant would look very like an elephant, at least in the legs and spine and pelvis and ribs. it could not sustain its own weight otherwise.


Post #95: Compactness, uniformity of condition, degree of control and personal quality of supervision down to smallest detail, benefit any program. In a country which has both a high per capita income and a reasonable flat income distribution, with the upper tenth enjoying only a fifth of the income and the lower tenth still possessed of a twentieth of the whole, health outcomes will be better whatever the system employed. By comparison, in the United States, the lower tenth commands little more than one percent of the national income, while the upper fifth enjoys half the income total.

Post #105: Your attempt to scale up what is done in one tightly run city to a continental scale ignores basic facts of the different societies.

Economies of scale, by the way, do not affect craft work, which the practice of medicine definitely is. Craft work must be converted to industrial labor on pattern in order to take advantage of scale economy, or in other words, must change its nature from that of a single person applying skilled labor to several persons with little or no specific skill working by rote. In the practice of medicine 'economy of scale' can be had only in purchase of supplies and equipments.