"When many cures are offered for a disease, it means the disease is not curable" -Anton Chekhov
''Once you tell people there's a cure for something, the more likely they are to pressure doctors to prescribe it.'' -Robert Ehrlich, drug advertising executive.
"Opinions are like sphincters, everyone has one." - Chris Rangel
Market Medicine: Another reason we don't pay doctors only for successes, from a reader:
You mentioned recently that someone asked why physicians don't get paid only when their patients get well. A good retort would be that in such a scenario, we need to set our own prices (rather than have the mercenary insurance companies set them for us) so that we can make up for the ones that don't get well, often despite our best efforts. In addition, we MDs ought to be able to choose which patients we accept for
treatment in that scenario, which would not bode well for ominous illnesses.
