4 ms·

Coincidentally things that insurance isn't involved in ...

wwweston 9y ago
Additionally: they're optional procedures, ones for which there are often long-accepted reasonable substitutions, and you can take your time researching and comparison shopping. Given those conditions, you could reasonably expect a market of competing private providers to do pretty well at yielding reasonable prices for effective services. (Absent those conditions -- anywhere that care and treatment are oriented around alleviating illness and suffering with any kind of immediate debilitating effects or urgency, really -- you might well expect that a market of competing private providers doesn't yield the same effects.)
- Consultant32452 9y ago
  In other words you could expect the market to improve virtually all medical care. The "urgent" stuff you describe where a person could not temporarily postpone our shop around is in the vast minority.
  - c256 9y ago
    I’m curious why you think this. When last I looked, a very large percentage of medical care was urgent care; in several demographics, it was a large majority. There are a variety of ways of measuring ‘how much’ medical care is given, which has a big impact on how things compare. Cost per capital, for example, is a fairly intuitive measurement and it skews heavily towards urgent care.
    - Consultant32452 9y ago
      The study cited in this article suggests emergency care accounts for just 2% of all healthcare costs. There's some other ways it could be calculated, but it's definitely not getting out of the single digits. http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/oct/28/nick-gillespie/does-emergency-care-account-just-2-percent-all-hea/ http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/oct/...
morogop 9y ago
Other features: - low barriers to entry (don't need a whole hospital) - commoditized service - non-essential - non-emergency - meaningful competition in most cities Compare to hospitals, which are absurdly capital intensive, used by people who haven choice, used in emergency situations, and where many cities have very little competition (often a single PE firm buys all of the hospitals in a tier 2 city, to eliminate competition, and increase prices). US healthcare is abhorrent.

Additionally: they're optional procedures, ones for which there are often long-accepted reasonable substitutions, and you can take your time researching and comparison shopping. Given those conditions, you could reasonably expect a market of competing private providers to do pretty well at yielding reasonable prices for effective services. (Absent those conditions -- anywhere that care and treatment are oriented around alleviating illness and suffering with any kind of immediate debilitating effects or urgency, really -- you might well expect that a market of competing private providers doesn't yield the same effects.)

Consultant32452 9y ago
In other words you could expect the market to improve virtually all medical care. The "urgent" stuff you describe where a person could not temporarily postpone our shop around is in the vast minority.
- c256 9y ago
  I’m curious why you think this. When last I looked, a very large percentage of medical care was urgent care; in several demographics, it was a large majority. There are a variety of ways of measuring ‘how much’ medical care is given, which has a big impact on how things compare. Cost per capital, for example, is a fairly intuitive measurement and it skews heavily towards urgent care.
  - Consultant32452 9y ago
    The study cited in this article suggests emergency care accounts for just 2% of all healthcare costs. There's some other ways it could be calculated, but it's definitely not getting out of the single digits. http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/oct/28/nick-gillespie/does-emergency-care-account-just-2-percent-all-hea/ http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/oct/...

morogop 9y ago

Other features: - low barriers to entry (don't need a whole hospital) - commoditized service - non-essential - non-emergency - meaningful competition in most cities Compare to hospitals, which are absurdly capital intensive, used by people who haven choice, used in emergency situations, and where many cities have very little competition (often a single PE firm buys all of the hospitals in a tier 2 city, to eliminate competition, and increase prices). US healthcare is abhorrent.