And there lies the issue with propping up the demand side of the equation with unlimited money from the government rather than regulating the supply side with affordable charges.
I don't think you can use ordinary market dynamics to regulate healthcare. During an emergency you should be driving to the closest hospital, not the most affordable one. And during an emergency you really have no insight as to how much of an emergency you have on your hands. Healthcare can essentially demand your entire worth. The market also has not even provided sufficient incentive for hospitals to announce their prices up-front.
That's kind of my point actually. I do think hospitals should publish their rates and so be forced to compete, but the government should also be regulating the price of services, overhead, and medicines for everyone instead of just medicare/medicaid patients. It's such an essential service that going to a hospital shouldn't be a decision to ruin you for life or not financially while hospital administrators, pharmaceuticals, insurance companies, and lawyers are raking in millions or billions. Instead, there should be some guarantee that you are getting "fair" rates.
I'm of the personal political opinion that almost always when the government steps in to fund things on the demand side of the market equation it leads to massive growth in costs and burden for consumers. Universities are another great example of this. If they do step in, they also have to regulate the supply side as the free market is effectively broken at that point, and people who...say want to pay their own bills or for their own education by working or don't qualify for whatever government program is helping others, are screwed by the system.
Government intervention always seems to rake money into companies' pockets rather than helping consumers and tax payers.
> government should also be regulating the price of services, overhead, and medicines for everyone instead of just medicare/medicaid patients.
> almost always when the government steps in to fund things on the demand side of the market equation it leads to massive growth in costs and burden for consumers. Universities are another great example of this.
I agree with all the points you make in your comment. I'll just add that the problem is far more complex than this. And, yes, it is all, 100%, caused by government intervention.
Without diving too deep, the problem starts with substandard education in the US all the way down to K-12 level. From there it goes to the insanely high cost of university education due to the government being involved in guaranteeing loan. Nobody in their right mind would give an 18 year old a $300K loan or $120K loan for a bullshit degree with no prospects of repaying it in their lifetime. Then we have heavy, expensive regulatory frameworks and horribly slow and bureaucratic processes to build or make just-about anything. And, finally, lawsuits.
When someone is laying on an operating table in the hospital, they are surrounded by a team with somewhere in the order of three to five million dollars in student debt. The same team likely spends somewhere close to a million dollars a year in liability and other licensing and insurance.
Each and every manufacturer of the equipment in that room and the tools used for the surgery, employs people with student debt in the range of $100K to $300K per person. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them. The companies has huge regulatory, legal and insurance costs.
The hospital is in a similar situation. Millions of dollars per year in legal, insurance and other costs and a workforce that owes millions of dollars in student loans. Not to mention the various laboratories and services that make the hospital run.
If you follow the various tentacles and construct financial cost model showing what it takes for a person to be on a table in an operating room, the resulting number will be massive.
That's the key to our broken healthcare system and why no socialist utopia is going to fix it.
Until we fix the underlying cost structures driving the system, it is impossible to pass laws to truly control such costs. The "single payer" idea is, in this context, in a range between utopia and demented.
Why is it demented?
here's an analog: We take out one credit card with zero interest for a year. The intent is to use it to pay off all of our other credit cards within that period using this card by transferring the balance. People do this all the time.
Here's the problem: They don't change their spending behavior. Instead of ending-up with no credit card bills after twelve months, they wake up one glorious Monday now owing more money and having one more card to pay off.
You have to fix the underlying cost structure first. The problem can't be solved without this important first step.
This means getting the government out of education, student loans and a bunch of other areas. It also means demanding that the government be efficient and effective in doing the work we hire them to do.
The problem with this concept is that the people need to understand reality in order for them to vote appropriately. We don't have an informed citizenship. Not even close. We have clans fighting against each other and a few of us in the middle yelling "the emperor has no clothes!", and nobody listens.
