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[February 23, 2008 @ 5:20 pm] Stuart Browning
On Friday, I appeared on Canadian national television in a story about the popularity of my video “A Short Course In Brain Surgery” and its contribution to the health care debate. The video (of which there are at least three copies on YouTube) has been viewed over 2 million times. Click the thumbnail to play.
The Perils of Public Health Care (CBC, Feb 22 2008) 
February 25th, 2008 at 3:37 pm
stuart,
great piece. keep up the good work.
joel
February 25th, 2008 at 11:36 pm
I appreciate concern for health care and am happy that other people are thinking about it and trying to figure out ways to make it better. What i don’t understand is why this couple from Canada were willing to pay for their care in order to get their MRI but not willing to pay for the care they received in the U.S. Do you not see the disconnect here? You can’t have it both ways. In essence, they still want someone to pay for the care they received regardless of how. Their situation is not a lot different from someone in the U.S. who has insurance but not necessarily the best one. Someone in the U.S. who has an HMO, can’t choose their doc, (but then again, who in the U.S. can, even if you have a PPO?), and needs a referral for any specialty care. They will most likely get faster care but their out of pocket costs will still be high. And if someone goes outside the network to get a brain tumor removed, that will most likely not be payed for by the insurance company. What do you suggest as an alternative to this? It’s nice to be like Michael Moore and just show people problems but offer no solutions.
Consumer driven health care doesn’t work either. If that were the case, we’d have a bunch of docs (already doing this here in the U.S.) going into plastics or dermatology, injecting botox, doing laser hair removal, and so on. How do we get medical professionals to enter fields that have less compensation but require harder work and longer hours? And since Medicare is cutting payments to physicians (private insurers tend to follow trends set by medicare) and cutting funds for medical education (yes, Medicare pays for the residents in this country), we will end up with less qualified doctors in the future, less outpatient docs and general surgeons. Well, I know quite a few people in Neurosurgery and a lot of them are subspecializing in Spine b/c you can make a hell of a lot more money in that field. And I’d like to see who’s going to remove a brain tumor 20 years from now in the U.S. Even better, suppose someone gets pancreatic ca, how many general surgeons are their in your own insurance plan now that have performed an adequate number of whipple procedures (most people consider 5 in the last 3 years, adequate)?