Re: [OT] I need a reality check

At 7:42 AM -0700 7/22/04, John Atkinson wrote:
>
>BS.  The money is already spent.  The cost of a
>medical procedure is almost entirely invented--you are
>paying for the surgeon's time and hospital fees.
>You're paying for med school loans and malpractice
>insurance and a part of the purchase price of the MRI
>machine and so forth.	Well, the surgeon is on salary
>and the hospital is already purchased, as well as the
>equipment.  It costs the government more or less the
>same whether it is being used or sitting idle in a
>corner.

Yeah, think of it this way. The Plastic surgeons do elective stuff on 
their down time and reconstructive work on soldiers injured in 
training or worse, in combat. They're military surgeons (or 
contractors) their work is paid for no matter what.

If it means we have a good set of plastic surgeons in the system able 
to do good work on injured troops when they're not making their wives 
look prettier, I have no problem with my tax dollars going to that.

>
>BAMC has one of the best burn wards on the planet.
>Right now, that's where they send most serious burns
>from Iraq once they are stable enough to move.  Now,
>I'm pretty sure that you've seen a good burn victim or
>pictures--say 90%+ of the skin destroyed.  Or you can
>imagine it.

Medical capacity in this case is very much like industrial capacity. 
You use it or you loose it, in this case if they have lots of time 
playing with elective procedures and then turn around and have lots 
of good staff for when injured troops come back, all the better!

>Now, the cosmetic surgeons aren't needed full time for
>this.	Thankfully we don't have that many casualties.
>So why not let them use their skills for the benefit
>of the military?
>
>One wonders how many of those "breast enlargements"
>were battle damage repair.  Wonder what an IED does to
>boobs?  Probably isn't fun.

Heck, Training accidents can be a problem. Then there's the breast 
reduction procedure where things are re-arranged and the overall mass 
is made smaller. I wonder how many career Army Women elect to have 
this done.

If taking better care of the troops and giving them more perks keeps 
more of the well trained, well motivated soldiers, airmen, sailors 
and marines in service then all the better. As a friend in Australia 
says, the Military is competing with the civil sector. The more 
benefits the Military offers and less BS they feed the troops, the 
more good staff they'll retain.
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