I have no doubt that theses 3 simple things would significantly cut down on the cost of healthcare but short of a massive growth in the out of pocket consumers to price select among them Doctors. There really isn’t a mechanism to either control or reverse cost growth in the health care industry.
Price selection is the only market force that empowers individuals to dynamically control costs in a way reflects both resources and their personal values & priorities.
You are correct, but there is a causal disconnect in the minds of a financially and economically ignorant public. They look at the market with distrust, despite the fact that over the last half century or more things that were expensive and exclusively the province of the rich are now cheap and readily available to the masses.
Liberals in the media and education establishments have convinced them that health care is a special case. Like every liberal “special case” this has lead to the opposite consequence. I don’t see how you can implement a full health care free market in a single step.
Instead, I think that just price signaling and the ability to reject health care insurance will over time do the trick. Keep in mind that liberals have misframed the question.
You don’t need health insurance. You do need health care. Affordability is the issue. Let me give you an example. A routine procedure has a nominal stated cost on the doctor’s invoice of $120.00. After a $98 PPO Provider Discount (essentially a insurer negotiated price) the actual cost is $22.00 which the insurance company applies to the patient’s deductible.
Now if that dollar amount were public and by law it isn’t, further by contract law the doctor cannot offer it publicly, shouldn’t we simply change the law, indemnify the doctor and force those prices into the public? Both the patient and the doctor are better off. The patient is losing excess insurance money paid in the premium and the doctor the time value of the payment, plus the paperwork overhead of managing the insurance contract.
In a country that values individual liberty instead of forcing people we can force infomation. This type of force is especially positive because it is legislation aka government force that created the problem in the first place. The insurance company is simply acting as a buyer’s club, negotiating a better price, but the pricing mechanism itself is ruined by laws against the free market. So the insurance companies are rent seeking and capturing a gain simply through political power, not market power or savvy.
Once price information is public and you remove the legal proscription against doctor’s offering their “best price” to the public you end the “health insurance” monopoly on information/pricing and allow people to get health care, perhaps without health insurance.
I think politically it is a winning argument. That laws exist to keep the public in the dark offends the average voter. I think if a TEA Party candidate took on insurance companies you’d capture plenty of the mushy middle. It would be a great campaign issue and hard to counter by an allegedly pro-people Democrat.
Either way publisizing the issue is a winner. Even if the TEA Party candidate loses in the GOP primary, publicity is gained and the crony capitalism that is killing America gets exposed. The GOP can live without the health insurance company money. It’s pro-market and pro-people by default.