Why hospitals should be abolished

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They are counterproductive for various reasons:

1. Putting people with different illnesses in one place leads to infections and the spread of disease.

2. Hospitals never accept liability for mistakes without mounting a big defence. People who can't afford a lawyer are vulnerable in the hands of big hospitals with budgets to afford protection of their interests.

3. They are run primarily for the benefit of the managers first, then the doctors second, then the nurses third. Managers have massive wages, doctors also very large wages. Both managers and doctors are generally arrogant and can deny patients the choice of treatment.

If we got rid of all hospitals, what we could then do is:

1. Receive treatments on a one-to-one basis with professionals based on ratings. A system could be created by which reviewers could on the internet rate different doctors and nurses. It would be easier to weed the bad out from the good. This kind of healthcare would be more person-centred and naturally to receive repeat business, practitioners would attempt to give people what they wanted.

2. Get treatment at home, in the workplace or at a venue of the practitioner's choice. More people would access healthcare who have busy or unorthodox lifestyles. This would go some way to solving the bias towards people living in large cities receiving better care. In this new system, since hospitals would be out of the equation, good doctors if they wanted to live and work in a country area could do so.

3. Be more likely to get access to the treatment you want. At the moment, your family doctor and hospital hold the keys to the gates. If we took away all the bureaucracy and made medical services direct and one-to-one then you could have anything you want, provided it was affordable to your health insurance/allotted health budget. In this new system, no one could tell you not to have a revolutionary new treatment or something alternative that some people don't like but others do.

The system would work by, instead of hospitals being funded by governments, citizens receiving the funding for health themselves. This could then be spent how they wanted - but it would be put in an account that would only allow spending to go out to registered medical professionals.

It's 2 o'clock in the morning here so my reading comprehension is a bit off but I agree. The entire economy is out of control in regards to executive/management salaries but healthcare is so tightly regulated by the government that hospitals (and the entire healthcare field) have a serious monopoly over their market share, they don't have to compete with each other on pricing and nobody is going to undercut them any amount that hurts them.

I honestly think that survival of the fittest would work out better, as is 62% of all bankruptcies are caused by medical bills (or so I've heard). Hospitals say they are all about saving lives on commercials but I think they destroy them. I was MISERABLE when I was 18 because my mom kept telling me she spent $6000 on me when I was in the hospital for a week when I was 17 with a collapsed lung. I will die before I go back to a hospital.

I think medicine should be opened up to the less educated. It's stupid to get an infection (and know where you got it exactly) and how to treat it but have to go to a doctor and pay him to prove what you already know so you can take antibiotics (like when I got strep). If people want to abuse drugs they are going to, so why is it easier for people to get cocaine than zithromax?

Don't let good ideas be self sabotaged by an either/or mentality.
Your ideas are good ones, they don't require the eradication of hospitals to work.
Forced adoption of ideas by eliminating competition however is mostly illegal I think.

Okay Obama, where do you expect to find funding for this? The government sure can't pay for it! For the right price you could get anything from private healthcare, but how much would that cost to have the best people from places like Johns Hopkins and Loma Linda make house calls? It probably wouldn't even be ethical for them to cater to you like that!

I disagree, OP.
Stafford is a permanent black mark, yes, but not all hospitals are run the same.

Disagree completely.

The NHS needs improvement and fast, but free healthcare is in my opinion important to those who can't afford private health care in the first place.

Also Hospitals get large amounts of people helped, a ono-to-one bais would be inefficent to deal with the masses of ill.


you would need alot of new Doctors and nurses. And what in the case of an epidemic?
Don't disregrad this, we are running out of antibiotic options.

I dont know how doctors should afford all the machines they would use, if they wanted to treat every illness a human can have. Laboratory for blood test and everything else, Analysis... this is all done by machines.

Even a normals doctors place is hardly affordable, my sister studied medicine, but we are from poor/normal family (My father was bus driver.). If she wanted to have her own doctors place she would have needed a credit of around 100.000$ only for inventory and machines a normal doctor needs. If you would close hospitals, they would need even more stuff, the hospital was doing until now, X-ray machines, MRT, Medical Fridges for all the different blood conserves they needed to keep, to do operations .... All the machines you need to handle cancer, so cancer is everywhere, so sure every doctor would have some patients with cancer a year. But with these few patients and their needed treatment, he wont be able to get enough money for the treatment to pay back the machines he needs to treat them. Buying a machine for 40.000$ and then using it 12 times a year, getting 200$ from the insurance...noone can afford to do that. And there are yearly base cost, for maintenance and servicing, nonetheless if you used the machines and laboratory 10 times or 500 times. Same goes for chemicals you need for the laboratory. So you had to store everything in case you need it, but not everything has durability forever, so you had to throw away lots of these stuff unused.

Some of the machines are that expensive, that the hospitals of my country bought them all together, and the two times a year a hospital has a patient, that needs that kind of machine, its transported to the hospital. How shall small independent doctors afford such stuff, when its even to expensive for a hospital alone?


Next problem would be the needed specialists i think. So if someone has a serious car accident, you have normal bones broken and normal wounds, you have damaged organs, you have head and brain damage, which needs specialists, you have damage on spinal column, which also needs specialists...

Force politicians to change the laws. In my country employers are forced to accept missing workers, if they have to visit the doctor. So I have to bring my employer a subscribed confirmation with the time I visited the doctor, so he can be sure, i didnt miss work for fun. And this is not meant against employers, its for them, because they dont have any use of workers getting serious ill, because they didnt dare to go to the doctor. As well as my employer has no use if I come to company with the real influenza, and infect the complete office and the workers at the building site as well. Instead you go to the doctor, he will tell you if its just a minor flu or something serious, and my employer doesnt have to be afraid that his whole company will be down for two weeks.

Why should your health insurance want to pay you a new, yet not proofed treatment? They are the ones paying it. If I do not agree with my doctor or hospital I can easily change the doctor or the hospital. But the health insurance stays the same.




Miss use of antibiotics is one of the biggest causes, why we get more and more antibiotics resistant bacteria. If you use the wrong antibiotics and bacterias survive, you helped them to achieve resistance against antibiotics. Even with doctors guidance, telling the people how long they have to use the antiobiotics, there are still idiots thinking they have more medical clew then a person that studied it for years. With the result of "Oh, but I am felling healthy again since 2 days. And the antiobiotics make me so tired. So I decide, that I know more about bacterias, antibiotics and medicine then my doctor. Lets visit grandma this weekend, she sure will be happy to see us and get infected with the few bacterias that survived the antibiotics until now, because they have high resilience!" If you buy yourself cocaine and misuse it, you have the disadvantages. But if you misuse antibiotics all other are affected by the disadvantages of your doing.

I agree with you, that often you know yourself, whats up. So when I had a bladder infection at a festival, sure i visited the medical tent and needed no analyse or doctor visit, but could tell the nurses from experience that I have a bladder infection. Still there are different bacterias and you need to know the resilience of the one you have, so the doctor knows which antibiotic will treat you right. But this short visit costs around 40$, coming in, telling the nurse to have a bladder infection, pee in a cup, wait for labor analysis of bacteria, doctor decides from analysis which medicament to use, get the recipe for the medicament, go. And 25$ of the costs have been for the labor analysis you need. Only 15$ for the visit itself.

I dont know how it is handled in your country, but in my country doctors get money dependent for the illment. So my doctor has no use of inviting me 3 times, to achieve more money. As long as there are no complications, he gets a stable amount from the insurance and done. Sure it will change when I get older, but right now when I read my annual statistic from the health insurance, my medical costs are way beyond the amount I pay, so right now its not the doctors that rob me, but the insurance. ^^ (I dont mean it this way, so I know that when I get older the statistics will change into the opposite.)

As someone who recently had surgery and was hospitalized and had radiation and chemo I don't understand where people would get that or some other things treated if not in a hospital.

The chemo was at a different place from the hospital but for the surgery and radiation I can't imagine a small doctor's office having those expensive machines. I was supposed to get a da vinci hysterectomy (in the end they had to cut me open instead) and I read the da vinci surgery robot can cost over 1 million dollars.

the problem with allowing the general public to diagnose themselves and subscribe themselves with drugs like anti biotics is that it is open to abuse- people using anti biotics for viral illnesses for example. The reason germs like the MRSA superbug came about was innappropriately issued antibiotics that led to virtually invincible bacteria evolving. I can see this happening at an express rate if medicine becomes more 'open' as you put it.

I completely agree with what other people have implied here about abolishing hospitals being a stupid idea. The problem is we need more hospitals, not less. The cash should be available to build smaller hospitals in suburban towns to care for fewer people so that lots of people arent forced together in the inner city hospitals. Plus theres the question of where surgeries are going to be performed. If its left up to the doctors personal convienience, I see this as causing greater social exclusion and invariably failing to save lives.

I'm confused here, are we debating provision of the NHS facilities and funding - aka Health & Social Care Act '12 or the standards set for Care & Nursing and the monitoring of these standards - aka Stafford & the incompetency of the CQC?

I think its bad to focus on all the negatives of any system. Sure, there's problems, but you end up convincing yourself that the current state of affairs is so bad that it couldn't possibly be any worse, when of course it could be waaaaaay worse. I think everyone should go visit a third world country where blinded children beg in the street, like in Mumbai.

I think receiving treatment at home and having a more direct relationship with your doctor(including compensation if any) would be preferable.

If you ever need your inflamed infected appendix removed you can do it yourself with a bread knife.

ruveyn

Doctors would still be able to provide expensive, specialist treatments. Some would specialise in those treatments and have the equipment in their home/personal office.

I'm glad there are people here who appreciate why I believe in this. I figured I wouldn't have universal support but I'd be willing to compromise on some points.

If some people want hospitals, then by all means let them have hospitals. At the same time if some people don't want hospitals and want a more person-centered care approach then let them have that too.

We'll see which works best. I have no doubt that the person-centered approach avoiding hospitals and based around choosing your doctors and nurses would provide better health and care outcomes. That's the only reason I brought this up in the first place. It upsets me people's potential is wasted by bureaucratic systems that standardise everything and lead to mediocrity.

Which would become, in effect, a hospital. And what if the patient were required to stay a-bed and be under observation for some considerable period of time. Then he would require a hospice which in effect would be a hospital.

ruveyn

There could be very small hospitals ran by a group of doctors without any bureaucracy running places to observe people if necessary. There could be small emergency rooms. But again, the focus would be on people being able to choose places that provide a service in a way they like. Why do you feel such a need to puncture my idea? Can't you see that a good idea even with holes in it is better than the same old indifference we've had for hundreds of years?