'AI' Is Supercharging Our Broken Healthcare System's Worst Tendencies

Post by johnnyworker » Wed, Nov 22, 2023, 6:02 PM UTC

cscurmudgeon wrote: post #75

johnnyworker wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The gap between rich and poor is growing at increasing pace, just like the gap between rich and mega-rich is. If you went completely hungry yesterday, nearly starved to death, but today you get enough calories that you feel less pain so you can at least stand up and walk around a bit, while you watch your brother stuff his face with so much cake he has to puke 3 times to make room for more, to then play frisbee with…

> The gap between rich and poor is growing at increasing pace, just like the gap between rich and mega-rich is. Why the hell should that matter? If the system wanted to keep poor people poor, won't the poverty rate stay the same? Thats the assertion I was countering. Why keep moving the goalpost? But I will play along: > If you went completely hungry yesterday, nearly starved to death, but today you get enough calori…

Post by nradov » Wed, Nov 22, 2023, 6:55 PM UTC

forgetfreeman wrote: post #105

skohan wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that "skilled healthcare" is essentially a cartel which uses artificial scarcity to increase the price. You can see the counter-example in Cuba, which has an incredibly high number of MD's per capita compared to other countries, and achieves very good healthcare results, especially in the context of other metrics of development and economy. There are so pitifully few health care practitioners compared…

Artificial scarcity? Maybe. There aren't but so many households with children that fit inside the venn diagram of can afford med school, has the intellectual capacity and bloody-mindedness to actually finish med school, and is interested in going to med school.

Post by mecha_ghidorah » Wed, Nov 22, 2023, 11:43 PM UTC

forgetfreeman wrote: post #105

skohan wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that "skilled healthcare" is essentially a cartel which uses artificial scarcity to increase the price. You can see the counter-example in Cuba, which has an incredibly high number of MD's per capita compared to other countries, and achieves very good healthcare results, especially in the context of other metrics of development and economy. There are so pitifully few health care practitioners compared…

Artificial scarcity? Maybe. There aren't but so many households with children that fit inside the venn diagram of can afford med school, has the intellectual capacity and bloody-mindedness to actually finish med school, and is interested in going to med school.

Post by forgetfreeman » Thu, Nov 23, 2023, 5:14 AM UTC

skohan wrote: post #142

forgetfreeman wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I'm not convinced. I've worked adjacent to the healthcare and pharma industries most of my adult life and I can tell you the complexity of the human body beggars belief. You aren't going to run the equivalent of a coding bootcamp for healthcare and get good results.

Not all of medicine is dealing with the full complexity of the human body. A lot of it is applying wrote knowledge to essentially follow a flow-chart to map a set of symptoms and details about the patient to a diagnostic / treatment plan. Doctors are trained to not deviate from medical orthodoxy, and for instance it's been studied that if doctors are told another doctor has already come to a given conclusion about a…

Post by forgetfreeman » Thu, Nov 23, 2023, 5:19 AM UTC

skohan wrote: post #154

nradov wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already have that structure to an extent. Much primary care for minor problems is delivered by a PA or NP. They are trained to escalate to an MD when necessary, although due to lack of training sometimes they miss things that an MD would have caught.

> due to lack of training sometimes they miss things that an MD would have caught. It goes the other way as well. My aunt is an RN and she loves to tell the story about the time that a doctor was in such a rush one time she had to call his attention to the fact that his patient was dead.