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I'm not sure if he went to one of these kinds of facilities, but my impression there is a reasonably competitive market in medical tourism: there are hospitals

by mjn 14y ago

I'm not sure if he went to one of these kinds of facilities, but my impression there is a reasonably competitive market in medical tourism: there are hospitals in Jordan that target themselves at enticing foreigners to fly there for treatment, and compete directly against similar hospitals in Thailand, India, and other places. They generally target an upmarket crowd, though, with some increasingly specializing to target Americans specifically. (I've noticed some of their websites attempt to delicately telegraph, "this is a hospital for you, well-off foreigner; don't worry, it's not full of locals.")

VLM 14y ago
The point I was kinda getting at is without a well informed consumer (good luck!) the best free market you can hope for is something rather like the process gamblers use to select a specific slot machine from a bank of slot machines. Or maybe a better analogy would be selecting a poker table in that you can select to sit down at the $5 ante table or the $10 ante table. Oddly enough given the strong asymmetry of knowledge and capital, the house always wins. Not much of a free market. Although I would agree that in the extremely limited area of price discovery of certain procedures, I'm sure they do better, mostly because we do so poorly its almost just statistically likely by random chance to be better.