(Highly selective sample because *EVERYONE* who has either of those two things now talks to my mom for reassurance. Drives her INSANE because all but one of the folks involved is very, very well of– they just don’t bother with insurance.)

Rob, what a smug ass you must be.

Perhaps in your little world of commenting ‘bon mots’ you consider running out of insurance to cover your treatments for cancer as ‘botique?’

Perhaps you consider hospitals dumping emergency room patients at the doors of other hospitals because they don’t have insurance as ’boutique?’

“If it bothers you so much, put together a charity to fund it for them?”
Why don’t you just crawl back under your rock?

The solution is to reform the tax code so that there is no longer a benifit to employer provided insurance, and the phase out of socialist medicine like medicare.

Reality, however, is that the Democrats are not interested in improving the system. They just want to control it. This is really about raw power.

Oh, and Tim P — the health care system is not “broken”. There are people who cannot afford boutique medical care. So what? If it bothers you so much, put together a charity to fund it for them.

Per my sister, who’s been an RN for 30 or so years, this is one of the reasons that “unnecessary tests” are run: CYA, nothing more, nothing less. For those times when the lawyer asks, “Doctor, I see you ran tests A, B, and C. Why didn’t you run test D?”
“Well, Counselor, I didn’t think it was necessary.”
“But test D can sometimes detect the disease in question, yes?”
“In very rare cases, yes”.
“But the chart shows you still didn’t run it.”
“No, Counselor, I didn’t.”
“No further questions, Your Honor”.

And so on. Generally, the physician or insurer settles before trial to save any even bigger payout, but you better believe they pass the costs along to us. Tort reform isn’t a cure-all for health care costs by any means, but, done right, it would help. But on the other hand, it shouldn’t go so far as to leave patients (or their survivors) without recourse in cases of genuine malpractice. As always, the devil is in the details.

I doubt it.

Including a scan basically to see if he had a brain– very slight chance, but they had good insurance, and club feet was a possible indicator.

The test came back saying Squeaker was fine– the poor couple ahead of him… didn’t.

How much do you want to bet that all the tests they’ve done on my nephew would count as “wasteful”? After all, you should just kill any defective child. Wouldn’t want someone to be stuck with an imperfect child.

I can think of a lot of things that become “wasteful” if you are pro-abortion. Even more if you’re pro-duty to die.