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Health insurance insulates patients

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by pnk » Sat May 01, 2010 2:39 am
Health insurance insulates patients from the expense of medical care, giving doctors almost complete discretion in deciding the course of most medical treatments. Moreover, with doctors being paid for each procedure performed, they have an incentive to overtreat patients. It is thus clear that medical procedures administered by doctors are frequently prescribed only because these procedures lead to financial rewards.
The argument uses which one of the following questionable techniques?
(A) assigning responsibility for a certain result to someone whose involvement in the events leading to that result was purely coincidental
(B) inferring the performance of certain actions on no basis other than the existence of both incentive and opportunity for performing those actions
(C) presenting as capricious and idiosyncratic decisions that are based on the rigorous application of well-defined principles
(D) depicting choices as having been made arbitrarily by dismissing without argument reasons that have been given for these choices
(E) assuming that the irrelevance of a consideration for one participant in a decision makes that consideration irrelevant for each participant in the decision

Pls give reason+your choice.

[spoiler][spoiler]OA - B; Source: LSAT[/spoiler]; [spoiler]My problem with B - opportunity for performing those actions (donot find any reference of this in agrument[/spoiler][/spoiler]
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Source: — Critical Reasoning |

by grockit_andrea » Sat May 01, 2010 6:12 am
I say B here; the opportunity for performing the actions is the "complete discretion" that doctors have in deciding on the course of a patient's treatment. That is, there's no one to stop them from prescribing unnecessary procedures. The incentive is the financial reward. The argument assumes that these factors "clearly" prove that doctors often prescribe treatments only to reap financial rewards.
Andrea A.
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by JamesR404 » Sat May 01, 2010 7:31 am
I second the choice for B. The main fallacy of the argument is that the action "clearly" is performed due to financial rewards, not taking into account any form of medical diagnosis and patient consent that may be present.
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by kaushals » Sat May 01, 2010 10:59 am
+1 for B
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by gsinghal » Sat May 01, 2010 1:05 pm
B for me too..[/spoiler]
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