> For five-figure annual fees, boutique medical services offer the wealthiest Americans the chance to cut the line and receive the best treatment.<p>Whether this buys you the <i>best</i> treatment is highly contestable and, I think, unlikely. It would probably buy you the <i>most</i> treatment, which is not necessarily what you want.<p>On the other hand, the long wait time to see physicians is a real concern, and it is advantageous to be seen sooner rather than later for essentially every condition. I think the moral hazard lies in the fact that you can buy access to earlier care, rather than with the fact that you can buy access to "top" physicians.<p>These are empirical questions which can/should be studied.
As someone who lives in a country with socialized medicine, (Canada), the discussion of hospitals removing "normal" (shared) rooms to replace them with more-profitable private rooms is disturbing.<p>Here, private rooms have become the standard that all new hospitals are built to. Not only are patients generally happier, but they drastically reduct the spread of germs between patients in hospitals. When my kids were born, (they're quite young - <6 years old), my wife had a private room. When my son was hospitalized for a couple of months last fall, he had a private room, with a couch-ish thing that I could sleep on. We didn't pay extra for these, the were the only options at the hospitals we were at. These are not special, private, hospitals in any way, they're just renovated and/or built within the past decade.<p>It seems like the profit-based healthcare system south of the border is keeping patients in shared rooms, which are nearly a generation out of date here.
> “They’re taking him to a local hospital,” Mr. Battelle’s wife, Michelle, told Dr. Shlain as the boy rode in an ambulance to a nearby emergency room in Marin County. “No, they’re not,” Dr. Shlain instructed them. “You don’t want that leg set by an E.R. doc at a local medical center. You want it set by the head of orthopedics at a hospital in the city.”<p>So, tying up an ambulance for a couple hours because they "too good" for an ER (which would be completely capable of dealing with a broken leg)?
> <i>He sees no reason that the medical world should not respond to consumer demand like any other player in the service economy. “Whenever I bump into a bleeding-heart liberal, which I am, I mention that schools, housing and food are all tiered systems,” he said. “But health care is an island of socialism in a system of tiered capitalism? Tell me how that works.”</i><p>I can't decide if this is the "two wrongs make a right" fallacy or the "whataboutism" fallacy.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_wrongs_make_a_right" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_wrongs_make_a_right</a> - <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism</a>
I just love how seemingly everyone involved in this is like "Wow this is so much, I mean I can't believe money gets you this, but I have the money/have been given the money so I guess we should do it" like this somehow manifested out of the thin air and everybody was just going along with it. Horseshit.<p>At some point, someone sat down with a few other people and proposed "Hey what if we charge rich entitled people insane fees so they never need to wait among the proletariat for medical care, you know, the ONE TIME in life when everyone is more or less equal" and they went along with it and now it's a business. Because apparently, when you're wealthy, the best thing you can find to do with your money is demonstrate to everyone else (or at the very least shield your delicate eyes from the suffering of) those less fortunate.<p>Crap like this really makes me look forward to capitalisms inevitable collapse.