6 ms·
Do you go to the doctor when you don't need to? Going to the doctor is essentially free to me as well and I haven't gone in years. Elasticity of demand goes b
by clavalle 9y ago
Do you go to the doctor when you don't need to? Going to the doctor is essentially free to me as well and I haven't gone in years.
Elasticity of demand goes both ways.
States like mine (Texas) have instituted tort reform. What happened? Insurance prices stayed the same and the insurance companies pocketed the difference. Also, hospitals had far less incentive to self-police their employees so we ended up with a lot of bad doctors and surgeons blithely continuing their malpractice.
As for scale: cost-sharing scales phenomenally well. Larger scale is an argument for national healthcare in the US.
I've never understood the perceived mechanism between the 'culture and demographics' argument.
- IanDrake 9y agoTo explain “need to go to the doctor”... To be clear, I’m talking about the cost/benefit. If the cost is $0, then that equation is out of balance. There are literally people going to the ER for a stomach ache. I’m only going off of personal experience here. You made a few interesting assertions about TX without references. Could you please site statistics for the increase of malpractice since tort reform went in place? Looking for myself, I only found articles refuting your assertion about insurance premiums [1]. 1- https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/southcentral/2013/09/03/303718.htm https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/southcentral/2013/09/0...
- clavalle 9y agohttps://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1635882 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1635882 "...find no evidence of reduced spending in Texas post-reform, and some evidence that physician spending rose in Texas relative to control states. In sum, we find no evidence that Texas’s tort reforms bent the cost curve downward." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5701901/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5701901/ "...our conclusion is that reforming the malpractice environment has largely insignificant economic implications for health insurance markets." So, I mispoke. Claims went down 75%. Malpractice premiums went down 50%. Yet, overall, medical costs to insurance companies and consumers rose at the same rate as everyone else. http://www.wfaa.com/news/prescription-for-disaster-is-the-system-stacked-up-against-victims-of-medical-malpractice/421319235 http://www.wfaa.com/news/prescription-for-disaster-is-the-sy... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/02/texas-legal-doctor-lawsuit-christopher-duntsch https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/02/texas-legal-do... And, finally, here are the numbers of cases referred to the Texas Medical Board for investigation. http://www.tmb.state.tx.us/dl/63D5291E-982C-D14C-B266-8983C532B208 http://www.tmb.state.tx.us/dl/63D5291E-982C-D14C-B266-8983C5...
- DrScump 9y agomedical costs to insurance companies and consumers rose that directly contradicts what you wrote in the parent comment.
- clavalle 9y agoYou have expertly found a flaw in my offhand comment. But the point, that much lauded tort reform doesn't do much, if anything, to help consumers (and, in fact, could hurt them) in the healthcare space, stands. If you step back from pedantry and consider ideas rather than pick apart the flaws in the imperfect words used to express ideas, you might find that the world becomes a more interesting place.
- DrScump 9y agoInsurance prices stayed the same ... which is a big improvement over double-digit-percentage annual increases in the rest of the country.