In America, doctors are rich and they are greedy. And in America, some hospitals are going broke.  The two are not casually connected.

First, let's take a look at whether doctors are overpaid. So let's check the pay for doctors in America as compared to another group of extremely high-skilled workers, say, physics postdocs who graduate from MIT.

The average salary for an E.R. doctor in America with less than 1 year of experience? From $103,000 to $197,000. Now compare with the average salary of a physics postdoc who just graduated from MIT but has yet to find a tenure-track position at a college: %25,000 to $30,000.

Now let's ask a simple question. What percentage of applicants does MIT accept?  10.7%.  What percentage of applicants do medical schools accept?  44.6%.

Something's badly out of whack here. An MIT physics PhD is orders of magnitude smarter than your typical E.R. doctor and has worked much harder -- yet the E.R. doctor makes tons more money when both are less than a year out of school.

How do we explain this?  Simple: the AMA operates an antic-competitive cartel in restraint of trade to jack doctors' salaries up, just as the ABA operates an anti-competitive cartel to jack lawyers' salaries up (in both cases by artificially inflating the cost of medical school and law school, and by artificially restricting the number of doctors and lawyers).

Doctors, like lawyers, are not only wildly overpaid and greedy, they're part of a greedy corrupt cartel that works hard to insure doctors' salaries stay sky-high relative to other professions with similar intellectual requirements.

An MIT physics postdosc is hands down smarter, has worked harder, and deserves more pay than your typical doctor. Doctors don't get paid stratospheric amounts of cash in America because they're smart -- a 48% acceptqance rate by medical schools guarantees your plumber is smarter than your doctor. And doctors don't get paid well because they work hard -- that illegal immigrant working off the books in the barrio sweatshop stitching jeans 14 hours a day works a lot harder than your doctor does, but she gets paid $5 an hour, while your doctors gets paid 10 times as much.

Doctors gets paid well because they operate a monopoly cartel which should be illegal -- just like lawyers.

However, none of that has a thing to do with whether hospitals go broke.  Some hospitals go broke -- specifically, private hospitals with emergency rooms that are required to take all patients are rapidly going broke. Private hospitals?  Nope, they're doing great. Hospitals without ERs?  Doing fine too.

The reality is that doctors really clean up when they go into business and start private labs. Those labs wildly overcharge hospitals for simple blood tests and other kinds of trivial tests and the doctors make out like bandits. The hospitals pay some of those costs on to insured patients, but those hospitals which can't, get screwed and go broke.

Don't believe the typical American medical procedure or test costs insanely more than comparable medical procedures and tests in other countries?  Take a look at the hard evidence. Scans and imaging fees, individual doctors visits, simple lab tests, drug prices, all cost astronomically more in American than in other countries. Not just 2x or 3x times other countries' cost -- noooooooo, 5x, 6x, 10x other countries cost. That's greed. Pure greed, classic greed, insanely self-destructive greed. That's doctors who want to drive a Bugatti Veyron getting together and setting up a lab that charges $500 for a simple blood test that costs $25 in France or $30 in Germany.  

So one of the most important reasons why hospitals are going broke is that they're hemorraging money for insanely overpriced tests -- tests performed by labs owned by doctors, run for profit, because 3 mansions and a vacation home in Acapulco and 2 yachts and 4 sports cars and a mistress just isn't enough for your typical doctor, no, he wants more.

So what we've really got is what was entirely predictable at the outset: no public option and a mandate for everyone to buy fabulously expensive private insurance. Then, of course, with their wonderful new captive market, watch the private insurance premiums zoom out of sight. After all...what's your option?  Zero. None. The government mandates by law that you must buy private insurance.

The medical-insurance industry execs are coming in their pants over this development. They're high-fiving one another and shouting, "Hawaiian vacation! Bugatti Veyron, baby!"  These people buy luxury yachts and sports cars with sick dying peoples' life savings, and now they've found a way to vampire even more cash out of more victims.

I think it may be a time for a new strategy for the downtrodden. If raw capitalism is rule of the day, and it constitutes the highest calling for our society, and all the suffering is worth it, then we need to basically concede and begin to look at it differently.

I would suggest attacking the "regulation" which the raw capitalists favor (such as physician licensing other government measures that actually serve to manufacture value through scarcity). Other things would be deregulating drugs (marijuana, pain killers, and others). The reasoning here is that if we don't have a right to health care, then we have a right to a humane and least painful death or dying process.