Any product or service that is purchased through a third party is inevitably going to get more expensive over time, because the three-party transaction has no mechanism in place to constraint the prices.
1. When you are insured and you need medical care, you don't care how much it costs because you're "insured."
2. The insurance company doesn't care how well the procedure is done because they don't have to live with the results.
3. The doctor is caught in the middle because he has a patient who wants Lamborghini-level care, but an insurance company that only wants to pay for a Chevrolet.
This here captures the essence of the problem perfectly. We don't have a health care problem in this country. We have a health care payment problem.
If you want anything to get less expensive, the best approach is to make people pay for it directly and incentivize the producers to develop economies of scale in producing it.
You are spot on and I agree.
I’m just not sure that’s feasible either. If it were, I’d support it.
I guess the final question is: Is the genie really out of the bottle? Is the industry so bloated, established and large that it cannot be fixed? Maybe it is.
The average nurses salary is $32 an hour, sometimes less. The average physician salary is in the $200,000 range, maybe more. People with no insurance would not be able to afford to pay for their time. Nurses and physicians are not going to work for less, it is stressful and backbreaking work.
The real issue is the administrative creep.It sucks the money out of the system. Billing needs to be simplified. Hospitals do no need utilization review, coders, nurses who review charts for hidden words that increase billing, diversity , corporate compliance. It goes on and on. I worked in one of those departments. It was not needed.
When that is eliminated, then lets talk about healthcare costs.