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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Cogito who wrote (51482)	3/3/2008 7:32:38 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 543184

I don't see how the government has been "heavily involved" in the healthcare market. Favoring employer providing insurance through tax breaks, regulating health care, regulation health insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, SCHIP, etc. Does that mean that you agree that the market won't reduce costs? With constantly growing demand, the market isn't likely to reduce costs unless supply explodes (and I don't think it will). OTOH if demand is constantly rising and more health care is consumed, than costs are going to go up whatever you do. You could try to manipulate prices but if you keep prices down you discourage supply and encourage even more demand. The market is unlikely to reduce costs. More government involvement is unlikely to reduce costs either. Not with constantly growing demand. Well I suppose the government could explicitly limit how much care people can get, and then costs (if by that you mean total amount spent) might go down. Or the government might distort incentives away from medical research that will add expensive new treatments or drugs, and then the cost of this research would be reduced, as would the number of expensive new procedures. So than cost would be controlled or even decline, but only at the expense of reducing future improvement in health care. I'd say that what has happened is that only the affluent have gotten the Lasik surgery. Well only the affluent by world standards (where even the American poor are pretty affluent), but its affordable by most Americans now. Lasik can be under $500 per eye for the basic procedure (but its very variable and an be several times that price). The market has made it less available, but not really more affordable. The nominal cost went down for some time after the procedure was introduced. The real costs probably continues to decline. That amounts to "more affordable"