14th
One major cure for health care
Remember when Lasik surgery burst onto the consumer market? The small amount of docs who were performing the “surgery” charged a super hefty premium - damn it was expensive! Then, damn near every ophthalmologist jumped onto the bandwagon and introduced competition in health care! Now, it’s advertised based on price and even quality measures. And guess what? Prices have come down. Because when you force individual doctors to compete against one another a funny thing happens. They compete on price and quality and magically prices come way down.
You can see this in dermatology, cosmetic surgery, and opthalmology. Anything that appeals to our vanity, prices are kept in check. They start advertising. They start doing their jobs better because their livelihood depends on it. They even start advertising how awesome they are with the numbers to back it up.
There is hardly any competition in the health care industry right now. If a system is set up where every health care service is like Lasik or boob jobs, I think we’d start seeing some monumental changes in health care prices. Because right now, the big players are laughing all the way to the bank and bleeding our economy drier than the bones it already is.
Well argued. Do you take insurance?
Besides vanity, those things have another thing in common: Insurance won’t typically cover ‘em. As long as the majority of personal healthcare costs are borne by a third party, then what incentive is there for the individual to shop around on the basis of price?
This is why it’s idiotic for insurance to cover regular stuff, like antibiotics, check-ups, pap smears, eye exams, glasses, allergy medicine contacts, etc. The whole concept of insurance is to protect against the things that are unlikely to happen, but if they did, you’d want financial protection. That’s why insurance will cover your car in an accident, but doesn’t cover getting new brake pads or new windshield wipers. Imagine if your car insurance covered oil changes — you think lube shops would compete so heavily on price?
(Incidentally this is also why it’s dumb to call Social Security an insurance program — what, you really didn’t know you might retire one day?)
Most young people, especially, would be much better served by cheap, high-deductible catastrophe insurance, that, say, kicked in after the first $10,000 expenses. However, as long as health insurance is to closely tied to employment, I doubt this will be too prevalent. Employers get a subsidy for providing health insurance to their employees, so there isn’t much incentie for employers to instead pay you that much in cash, and then light you get a cat. plan on your own.
McCain’s plan was to end this nonsense, but he got pilloried for it. In fact, it was his only good idea of the whole campaign.
