6 ms·

"The thing is, health care is 'natural monopoly', it's a situation where competition is meaningless at the point when a person shows up bleed at the emergency r

• peteey 7y ago
  The bleeding example makes costs seems like random accidents, but most spending is on genetic illness and the elderly. A lifetime supply of insulin is much more expensive than setting a broken bone. We are not all equally likely to have cancer or respiratory disease.
  • krupan 7y ago
    Supply and demand should take care of this though. A lifetime supply of food is pretty reasonable these days. A lifetime supply of common medications should be about the same, right? Too much regulation restricts supply and too much health care bureaucracy screws up demand. Of course people should still have insurance (possibly government provided?) for the very rare and expensive surprises (just like a house fire is rare and expensive).
    • jwbwater 7y ago
      Much easier for consumers to control food spending than drug spending. Lots of cheap food to choose from. Many chronic illnesses require medications for which there is no good substitute. Too much regulation is not responsible for high drug prices, deregulation is. Companies are allowed to buy their competitors and then raise prices.
      • bhupy 7y ago
        Okay then what’s stopping someone from starting another company and selling the same product at a lower price?
        • mvid 7y ago
          Entry costs, regulatory capture, intellectual property?
          • bhupy 7y ago
            > Too much regulation is not responsible for high drug prices, deregulation is > regulatory capture, intellectual property Ostensibly would seem that relaxing regulation and (more importantly) abolishing or heavily weakening medical patents would help drive down costs. Can you imagine if tech companies could patent their products the same way medical companies do today? Uber would no longer have to worry about finding a moat, their moat would simply be their patent on "digital ride sharing provided by dynamic pricing to predict demand and position supply" (or some similar conceit). Smartphones would all be expensive and Apple would have a monopoly on multi-touch phones with capacitive displays and built-in app-stores. If food companies could patent food the same way drug companies can patent drugs that they prepare, bread would be expensive and you wouldn't have store brands and generics to keep the price of the fancy Whole Foods bread in check.
• joe_the_user 7y ago
  This is a bit of a false narrative. 99% of healthcare is not emergency room, imminent bleeding out. Fine, it is a "dramatic illustration" but for even ordinary, ongoing medicine, the average consumer isn't in a position to evaluate the choices involved, there a natural advantage whatever health care provider is in the area, necessary regulation create severe barriers to entry and so-forth.
  • krupan 7y ago
    Yes, the situation we have now sucks. But that's where we should start questioning. Is all the regulation we have necessary? Why aren't average consumers in a position to evaluate the choices, just like we do for food (admittedly, we aren't doing the best job at choosing the best foods, but we like our freedom of choice, and the information and options are there)?
    • joe_the_user 7y ago
      Why aren't average consumers in a position to evaluate the choices How could a consumer be in a position to evaluate their physician (and the entire health care process)? The knowledge required is huge. Moreover, once you have an adversarial market situation where the competitors use any means available to present themselves well, the ability of the consumer to do these evaluations will further decline - after twenty years of ecommerce, determining if a random thing I buy on Amazon actually has value is still hard, still a crapshoot (I don't mind having to be careful buying a random thing on Amazon, that's reason tradeoff. For something that could threaten my life, it's not a reasonable tradeoff). But bad health care products and services can kill you. The usual answer is "we'll find a third party to do the evaluating" but unless that's actually the state, at which point things pointless, you will still have all the corruption of today - insurance companies are the evaluators and aggregators of health care services but they ultimately can't control prices (they can limit services provided but aren't really limiting the price for the services - they don't have an incentive to do so since they take a cut of the services).
      • krupan 7y ago
• empath75 7y ago
  Try getting a quote on the price of a baby delivery from a hospital before you go. https://youtu.be/Tct38KwROdw https://youtu.be/Tct38KwROdw
  • krupan 7y ago
    Correct, right now this sucks. But it could be fixed in ways that don't involve socializing medicine.
    • dogma1138 7y ago
      You don’t need to socialize medicine, just make all HMOs and providers non for profits which would mean they have to reinvest everything into their core services rather than posting returns for investors.
  • usaar333 7y ago
    That's not a symptom of health care being a natural monopoly. That's a symptom of a lack of price transparency. 1. Laws can correct this. 2. A large segment of consumers paying out of pocket would also result in competitive pressure for hospitals to disclose prices. Fwiw, I don't have this problem with smaller medical clinics.