(01-30-2019, 10:23 PM)mikesez Wrote: (01-30-2019, 09:59 PM)Last42min Wrote: Buyers want affordable health care. Sellers want customers. Both parties know what they want. One of my primary concerns with liberal economics is they think that anyone uneducated will fall flat on their face. That's not how people operate. People will figure out what is in their best interest.
Removing insurance from the primary interaction between doctors and patients will drive health care costs down, not because patients are informed, but because doctors are. They will compete against one another, which will benefit the patient. The patient only needs to know which doctor is suits their particular need. Those who want customer service will pay for it, and those who want the best bang for their buck can look for it. We have the legal system to help weed out those doctors who are grossly negligent. The government should focus on creating a competitive environment, insulate itself from corporate interference, and punish those who prey on the weak. Pretty much the exact opposite of what's happening now.
Also, just to rebuke your point, neither of the above are necessarily available in a socialized health care system. There is no guarantee both parties will have access to all information (in fact, it would be less likely in a government monopoly) AND there are no alternatives.
Consumers lacking the ability to understand their own healthcare is one reason that the free market does not improve healthcare.
Involving the government more will not suddenly make people understand stuff that you need years of medical school to understand, I agree. I don't think the government would fix that problem.
But involving them more will help prevent people from buying stuff that will not improve their lives, and it will help make sure that the treatments that do improve lives are affordable for all of the people who would benefit from them.
I also think you could have a bigger role for the government without eliminating alternatives.
In Canada or in England if you want more than what the government provides, sucks to be you, go to another country.
But in Germany, or France, or Switzerland the government provides a minimum amount of care and you can buy more, or faster, or more luxurious, if you think that's a good use of your money.
So let me get this straight. The same government monopoly that was given tens of thousands of dollars and 13 years for my education failed to make me competent enough to understand my own healthcare. So your solution is to put the same government monopoly in charge of said healthcare decisions? In what world is this logical? Self interested people with the ability to hold providers accountable do better making their own decisions than unaccountable bureaucrats. The answer is more transparency and consumer education, not an even bigger curtain of the state that isn't governed by any real standard of honesty (Barrack Obama would have been jailed if her were a CEO of a private healthcare company.)
I also find it interesting that, more often than not, interventionists never actually take the time to evaluate the results of intervention. Every wart or freckle in a market result can be analyzed dissected and stated as a call to action. Then when the government intervenes, MAKES THINGS WORSE, we blame the market? Accreditation, Licensure, and the AMA have very little to do with a true free market economy and they account for hundreds of thousands of dollars blocking the entry of intellectual capital into medicine.
Economics is the rationing of scarce resources. On a fundamental level, the biggest driver in the cost of someone to cut into your chest and fix a heart valve is that there are only few people who know how to do it. There's only so much any "system" is going to mitigate that economic reality.
When you look at healthcare, like any good or service, the price is also a reflection of the amounts of resources that go into bringing that product to market. In this case we have: The actual cost of care, the cost of the Insurance bureaucracy, and the cost of the government bureaucracy. The basic fallacy with interventionists is that somehow dramatically increasing the size of the government bureaucracy is somehow going to reduce the cost of the underlying good or service which basically defies economics. At current, just so the administrators between the care provider, the state and the insurance companies can talk to each other people get full college degrees in billing and coding. It takes a decade in some cases to bring certain drugs to the market. Those are massive massive costs that are absorbed by the consumer that don't actually go into the pocket of care providers. If you really want to reduce costs then we have to mitigate those extra expenses.
What's the best way to do that? Let providers develop their own risk pools. There are lots of consierge practices and cooperatives that are set up where instead of paying a premium to a third party insurance company for the majority of your healthcare, you pay a monthly membership fee to the doctor and go when needed. This saves tons of money in cost of compliance alone. And we couple that with CATASTROPHIC INSURANCE for the cancer diagnosis or major illness that the average person can't pay for.
