Max I am not talking anything about plantiff lawyers. I don’t even know what point you are trying to make.

It is clear to me you know nothing about the percent of medicine that is funded by public dollars. You know nothing about how about the laws that exempt health insurers from antitrust laws. Heck, Sen Patrick Leahy held hearings last month to look at repealing this exmption due to allegations of price-fixing. I mean really, quit embarassing yourself and LOOK IT UP. You do know how to use google don’t you?

It seems you’ve lost the point of your own argument. A law in Nevada expressly caps the amount plaintiff’s lawyers can make.

You have analogized this law to situations where by some health care plans will freely negotiate rates with providers that bear a relation to the government’s own reimbursement rate.

Do you really and truly not see the difference between an express restriction on fees and a freely-negotiated rate that bears a freely-negotiated relation to a separate government rate?

Buses crash far, far more commonly than airplanes, but John Madden still won’t fly. And what you don’t get, or don’t want to get is that if all doctors are doing extensive testing in the false belief it will help them in a suit, it doesn’t matter if it is not actually helping. That doesn’t make the test any cheaper…

Lastly, your hospital chair conversation is one of two things:
A: a lie
B: A very middle-upper class situated hospital that I and most docs would love to work at.
Those numbers are from the CDC in 2007
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/hus07.pdf
“Overall, private health insurance paid for 36% of total personal health expenditures in 2005, the federal government 34%, state and local government 11%, and out-of-pocket payments accounted for 15%.
Not quite 50% of public funds (not just medicare and medicaid but the vast majority being those two entities), but also that was for 2005, four years ago. I (and anyone here in the business) highly doubt those percentages have gone down.
Again, if you want to be part of the conversation max, quit being lazy, those numbers are hardly hidden. Do I need to wipe your butt after you take a crap too?

However, this is a minimal issue in comparison to the oncoming “reforms” in congress. It’s a shame you don’t see it.

Reforms are more about the practice of medicine than the dollars. Right now medical students and residents are being trained in the era of “lawsuit avoidance” instead of evidence based medicine. The perception that you can be sued for anything has become the reality and has wormed itself into the fabric of medicine. In biologic terms the host has been taken over by the parasites. Medicine needs a deworming.

And CT scans etc. is based on the hospital. That is like us complaining about expert witness fees. Let’s compare apples and apples and keep the discussion on professional fees.

And Matt,

Physicians are hardly the highest paid profession. We are regularly out earned by the CEOs that run our facilities, investment bankers, trial lawyers, business consultants, etc. No one in their right mind goes into medicine for the money. Between the cost of lost opportunity over the time spent in training and the student loan indebtedness, it takes an ignorant man to believe physicians are so well paid. My younger brother is a retail store general manager. After my student loans are paid, he takes home 20% more than I do each month…