I would much rather be able to request services in the way Amazon allows you to buy products than continue to engage in the current opaque system.
No? I want it separated from employment and universally and freely available like the rest of the developed world.
(At half our costs, and similar outcomes!)
Sorry, I’m not following.
So under that definition what you’re describing isn’t relevant to whether it’s a commodity or not.
Also, health care isn’t a commodity right now but I’d argue it should be (a high quality one).
Amazon Care does not provide emergency surgery at the moment.
Health care is far more than just emergency services.
Water, for example, is a commodity. It doesn't matter where you get it, because water from one tap is mostly indistinguishable to water from a different tap. When you need water, you simply just go to the closest tap and you can be happy that you're getting the same quality water as anywhere else. That's exactly what you want with healthcare, too.
In fact, commoditization of healthcare is probably one of the best steps towards making it a public utility. So if that's what you want, then you probably do want healthcare to be commoditized.
Different hospitals have different facilities as well. You’re better off having a type of procedure at one place than another for example. And even if you somehow made it so every hospital had the same high quality equipment you still wouldn’t have the same quality of specialists, surgeons, etc. This matters a lot.
There’s probably a baseline we could get to but the experience will never be a commodity overall.
But for more common things like an annual wellness exam, or blood tests, mending a broken arm, treating the flu, or even doing surgery on a burst appendix, those are things that I think can reasonable be commoditized across any healthcare providers.
The next day I was on a flight from SFO to Singapore, and it was extremely apparent I had strep. Upon landing in Singapore, I went to a clinic where they diagnosed the strep, gave me antibiotics, decongestants, sudafed (the good kind), throat lozenges, and ibuprofen. Total cost? $20 USD.
But I don't see the US government being able to do anything serious in the near term, with the forces of overpowered lobbying and general insanity working against it.
We’ve picked the worst of each approach in the US and combined them.
In the US, most health plans include co-pays for various services, annual deductibles that delay the point that the insurance actually starts paying for things, and lifetime limits on the total amount the insurance can be required to pay. So people in the US usually have incentives to avoid using medical services unless they absolutely must. These incentives magically morph otherwise reasonable insurance plans into rather expensive versions of catastrophic insurance plans with a prescription benefit.
Is a system where n% of the care is provided by unqualified/unlicensed providers masquerading (indistinguishably) as other, qualified providers, where the reviews are invariably fake, and from which both customers and providers can be banned from the system with no recourse for arbitrary reasons really something we want?
Not to mention that people are different in their health needs, responses both physiological and psychological to treatment, and in their goals for healthcare.
I didn't think much could make the US's current health system less transparent or effective, but on reflection I think Amazon taking their current marketplace strategy and applying it to the health industry with a wide brush might just do the trick.
I think their thesis is aligned with Amazon: to decouple primary care from insurance as much as possible.
Another interesting care provider is Curai which (like Amazon) mostly focuses on tele-health: https://curaihealth.com/
Full disclosure: while I don't work for either of these companies, I do work on healthcare pricing and payments, and adjust claims; so I generally find news like this to be interesting and cool.
If he can do that with healthcare, it could be a godsend for a great many people currently suffering under the opaque, private-equity-rigged healthcare system the US currently has. Such a system is ripe for disruption.
It seems to largely depend on what kind of healthcare quality and health outcomes Amazon can deliver while pushing prices down, as well as how Amazon can deal with the edge cases that currently account for the bulk of healthcare expenses in the current system.
One litmus test for where they're heading with this is whether they publish fixed costs for medical procedures or not. That seems to be one necessary-but-maybe-not-sufficient requirement for getting this mess under control.