> Your wife's screaming in pain during labor, are you really going to jump on your phone and check to see if the anesthesiologist in front of you is in-network?

> Your wife's screaming in pain during labor, are you really going to jump on your phone and check to see if the anesthesiologist in front of you is in-network? And what do you do if s/he's not? I think it was the economist Kenneth Arrow that used situations like this as an example of why health care cannot be treated like other markets. Free Markets™ require information by buyers, and there tends to be asymmetry in this regard in medicine more than in many other markets. * https://web.stanford.edu/~jay/health_class/Readings/Lecture01/arrow.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/~jay/health_class/Readings/Lecture0... Usually when buying a product or service you know the price ahead of time, but with medical treatment this is often impossible for non-elective / emergency procedures.