I've admired the blog for several years, but you are making an unfair comparison and thereby an ineffective rebuttal of somebody else's ridiculous comparison. You compare the pay of the surgeon for a procedure to the price the patient pays. Somewhere between these numbers is the actual cost of the procedure which includes costs for other personnel, for surgical supplies, for the operating room, for the billing system, etc.

Someone else's first mistake is to compare a corporate-employed surgeon's wages for about an hour's work on one procedure, and John Edwards's lifetime earnings. Her second mistake ignores the large awards that Edwards received from corporations. Something like 12 children had been killed or permanently crippled by swimming pool drains before Edwards won so much in compensatory and punitive damages for a girl ruined by having her intestines sucked out that the company decided to spend a few shekels to improve the drains. If someone else is going sling around a ratio of 10000 she should compare lifetime earnings for a top flight private-practice surgeon with Edwards's lifetime earnings and she should include only compensations from medical malpractice insurers if she states the comparisons involves Edwards income from suing doctors.

Someone else's third mistake is complaining about Edwards being better paid than her friend for providing a necessary service in an imperfect system when she herself is better paid for performing a unnecessary disservice. If someone else were as talented a lawyer as Edwards, she would still be practicing law and could reasonably expect to earn about the same amount as he does.

Hi, Craig. In my partial defense, the $11,000 wasn't the whole bill, which was much more. It was only the surgeon's bill. However as we both know the bill the surgeon presents and the money she actually gets from the insurance company are two different things, and subject to the constant negotiation which is one big reason medical costs are so high. I had no way of knowing how much she finally settled for, but it was certainly a whole hell of a lot more than that preposterous $380 figure. My point is that Coulter just makes shit up, and doesn't even bother to make her lies even vaguely plausible. Which of course shows massive contempt for her readers, a contempt I certainly share.

OK. I made 2 mistakes. First, I was wrong to think $11000 to be the total price for an appendectomy. And I do believe that some else just does make shit up, but I'm not sure that the $380 figure is bogus. It sounds like someone else's ex-roomie is employed by a Kaiser or contracted by an HMO. If someone else's friend performed 4 surgeries a day for 230 days a year that would be a yearly $360K take home which sounds like it's in the ballpark for a captive physician. On the other hand, private practice surgeons may pull down 7 figures or 8 if they head a particularly lucrative practice.

The second mistake is that someone else's 10000-1 ratio would imply $3.8M for Edwards medical malpractice take home which can't be lifetime, but seems high (made up?) for a typical case. Wikipedia mentions over $60M in 20 cases of which Edwards took home 1/3 for about a million per case. I should have found a different excuse to drag in the swimming pool drains and the peculiar nature of the tort system. If someone else was making a double-edged attack -- Edwards is rich so vote for a Republican and he's a slick trial lawyer who extorts money from hard-working insurance companies so vote for a Republican and support tort reform -- I do want to drag in the pool drains since it took the $25M award to get the drain manufacturer's attention. I also want to clout someone else about the head and shoulders with my copy of "A Civil Action" which shows just how flawed the tort system can be, but not in excessive awards to injured plaintiffs.

Good points. I'd like to discuss this further, off-blog. Would you mind emailing me? Address is jerome.doolittle, followed by the customary symbol, followed by gmail.com.