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Funny, it happens that I actually tried to go to the local urgent care that day, and I was turned away because they couldn't handle an injury that serious. Eve

Funny, it happens that I actually tried to go to the local urgent care that day, and I was turned away because they couldn't handle an injury that serious. Even if they did, I made my decision based on which provider I thought was doing to do the best job... I didn't know at the point I made that choice whether I would need those vicodin, so they wouldn't have been part of my decision. And once I was checked in to the SF General Hospital (after two hours of waiting) I was definitely not going to hobble down the street, trying to compare prices on vicodin. Also my damn leg was broken. It wasn't really the right moment to break out Google Sheets and create an expected value analysis of my various healthcare provider options. It's nice to say "if only we had more agency, prices would be lower"... but it ignores the fact you still need risk pooling (insurance) unless you expect everyone to keep savings for the worst case scenario. And pretty quickly a risk pool means someone has to decide how much that pool should pay to help treat a particular injury... and you're back to where you started.

Consultant32452 9y ago
Of course I would expect people to carry catastrophic coverage. And your case with a broken bone would qualify for a catastrophic event. But if the majority of healthcare purchases are driven by 300 million people seeking the lowest price for Vicodin, no one would be able to charge you $1,000 for vicodin even if you were going through insurance for this particular incident. >And pretty quickly a risk pool means someone has to decide how much that pool should pay to help treat a particular injury... and you're back to where you started. Not someone, EVERYONE. Each individual person must decide for themselves if they want to try pay a middle man insurance company some profit every time they get the sniffles or if they'd rather deal with that on their own, save money, and just get catastrophic coverage. All of these things you're concerned about... we have an entire history of the healthcare industry before the New Deal where we saw how low healthcare prices were. We distorted the market with New Deal regulations putting caps on salaries, so companies started offering healthcare to employees. We can undo the damage done by the New Deal without getting all authoritarian about it.

Consultant32452 9y ago

Of course I would expect people to carry catastrophic coverage. And your case with a broken bone would qualify for a catastrophic event. But if the majority of healthcare purchases are driven by 300 million people seeking the lowest price for Vicodin, no one would be able to charge you $1,000 for vicodin even if you were going through insurance for this particular incident. >And pretty quickly a risk pool means someone has to decide how much that pool should pay to help treat a particular injury... and you're back to where you started. Not someone, EVERYONE. Each individual person must decide for themselves if they want to try pay a middle man insurance company some profit every time they get the sniffles or if they'd rather deal with that on their own, save money, and just get catastrophic coverage. All of these things you're concerned about... we have an entire history of the healthcare industry before the New Deal where we saw how low healthcare prices were. We distorted the market with New Deal regulations putting caps on salaries, so companies started offering healthcare to employees. We can undo the damage done by the New Deal without getting all authoritarian about it.