scientific research and space exploration have a problem with profit.
The physical "worth" of the marketplace rarely accrues to the creator,
discoverer or practitioner of the profession. An exception being
surgeons in the current situation. The economist William Baumol
has been doing work on this problem and has not arrived at any
solution in the current free market. It is the Achilles Heel of Economie
of Scale and eventually leads to a revolution where the creative
practitioners are forced to destroy the system just to keep creativity
flowing. If something is highly needed like surgery or practical, like
the current technology for the information revolution then it works for
a while but eventually the middle money men take over and the
process repeats. Edgar Allen Poe wrote a humorous piece on it
in the 19th century with a name something like the "Strange Case
of Dr. Tarr and Mr. Feather" and likened it to a mental asylum.
REH
Christoph Reuss wrote:
On Wed, 26 Jan 2000, Harry Pollard wrote:
> Every year a bunch of US cardiac specialists went to the Soviet Union and
> for two weeks, they would work solidly in a Moscow hospital doing, I
> suppose, triage as they took patients from the multitude to operate and
> save lives. I remember one comment from a US doctor. He couldn't believe
> that the Head of Cardiology at the Moscow hospital got a salary of $7 a
> week - about the same as a bus driver. A sure way to attract the best
> people into medicine.Harry obviously said this last sentence in jest, but it's actually true:
Giving doctors a small salary will attract the best people into medicine --
those who become doctors to help and heal people, instead of those who are
"in it for the money" (as in the West). The still-increasing excesses of
the medical-industrial complex in the West illustrate quite "well" that
public health and profit-making is rather *inversely* related...Chris
To quote from an earlier posting on this list:
>
> Report Says Profit-Making Health Plans Damage Care
>
> July 14, 1999> WASHINGTON -- Patients enrolled in profit-making health insurance plans
> are significantly less likely to receive the basics of good medical care --
> including childhood immunizations, routine mammograms, pap smears,
> prenatal care, and lifesaving drugs after a heart attack -- than
> those in not-for-profit plans, says a new study that concludes that the
> free market is "compromising the quality of care."> The research, conducted by a team from Harvard University and Public
> Citizen, an advocacy group in Washington, is the first comprehensive
> comparison of investor-owned and nonprofit plans. The authors found that
> on every one of 14 quality-of-care indicators, the for-profits scored worse.> "The market is destroying our health care system," Dr. David U. Himmelstein,
> associate professor of medicine at Harvard University Medical School
[...]
