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A third-party payer system, such as Medicare, has no incentive to keep costs low.
by joshuaheard 11y ago
A third-party payer system, such as Medicare, has no incentive to keep costs low.
- emodendroket 11y agoMedicare is among the best at keeping prices low, but none of this is even relevant to the article, if you'd read it.
- eonw 11y agothis may be true, but when a doctor finds out you are on medicare versus say, paying cash, they add on a few extra procedures just to bill the gov a bit more. source: i work in healthcare.
- mmastrac 11y agoThat's an absolutely ridiculous statement. As a Canadian myself, we are constantly seeing the struggle to reduce the cost of providing health care as a proportion of the taxes we pay. I don't know where this myth comes from -- is it just a misunderstanding of how public health care works, assuming that it's an infinite money pit?
- emodendroket 11y agoIt comes from motivated reasoning.
- Frondo 11y agoIt comes from buying into the anti-government propaganda that the hard right has been pumping out for decades. Once you buy into that, you start applying that faulty reasoning to the real world, and you come up with afactual claims like the original poster did.
- ams6110 11y agoMedicare has an incentive to keep prices low, which is demonstrated by the fact that in many (most?) cases it reimburses providers at less than their cost. Perversely, it also raises costs by increasing demand for medical care.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y agoMaybe in Libertopia, but, on the other hand, actual reality.
- joshuaheard 11y agoWow, I sure got slammed for what I thought was a self-evident comment. I'll give one true example why I believe this. I was injured and the doctor said I needed an MRI and prescription pain meds. I said, doctor, I don't have insurance. He said, in that case, you can have an X-ray and Tylenol. This is true for Medicare and private insurance. Think about it. You buy a car based on how much you can afford. If I offered to buy you any car you wanted regardless of price, you would pay much more for a car than if you yourself had to pay. If this were true for everyone, auto dealers would no longer have to compete on price, but would instead would compete on giving the best service, raising costs even further. Historically, health care costs began to greatly rise when the federal government made it a tax deduction for employee health insurance. This pushed everyone into private insurance. Costs have spiraled ever since. The solution (as proposed by both candidate McCain and candidate Romney) is to shift the tax deduction to the individual for medical costs. This allows people to afford health care, but also introduces competitive market forces (from a first-party payer) into the equation.
- icebraining 11y agoIf I offered to buy you any car you wanted regardless of price Except that's not what Medicare does. You may not have an incentive to get the cheapest treatment, but the people running Medicare do have an incentive to keep costs down, and the power of law to do so.