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Politics : A US National Health Care System?
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To: Road Walker who wrote (2026)9/6/2007 12:15:45 PM
From: TimF  Read Replies (1) of 42652
 
Even if there are competing suppliers you're bargaining position is weakened when you don't have a lot of time to search for or compare them, but your right there still is a benefit, esp. since you can benefit from the efforts of others to make providers compete on price even if you don't pay much attention to the price yourself.

If you could get movement on either of the two factors you mention (or have more people go to "catastrophic insurance" or what I call "real insurance" even if it is paid for by employers) than you would tend to get more price competition.

It would probably never work as well in medicine overall as it has in some other areas, but it would work to help control prices.

The reasons why I think it wouldn't work quite as well? -

(In no particular order)

1 - "Baumol's cost disease"
en.wikipedia.org

2 - Less foreign competition. - You can become a medical tourist but its harder to import medical care, you have to move yourself instead in most cases.

3 - In an emergency its hard to carefully evaluate costs.

4 - The idea that, "I don't want cut rate surgery" (or other treatment) because its viewed as inferior, is stronger than the idea that bargains are of inferior quality in other sectors of the economy, and of course people are more willing to risk inferior quality in most other sectors than they are when they could die from it.

None of which means that more competition can't help control costs, they just imply that costs are going to be high no matter what we do.
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