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Comment by heyoni | Hacker News Reader

Is that universal healthcare with extra steps? Almost, but on a serious note, why not go all the way with universality?

Because universal healthcare is not the best solution, as is becoming increasingly evident in Canada and the UK.

We need to fix the price gouging in the medical system by incentivizing competition. With the way things are currently set up in the US, the hospitals are essentially written a blank check any time a patient steps foot on their premises. If we bring competition between the hospitals with price transparency, the prices will fall dramatically.

> If we bring competition between the hospitals with price transparency, the prices will fall dramatically.

How do you envision this working for say emergency care, where as a patient you may not be in a state to make an informed decision about which hospital to visit?

Most ER visits are not life or death situations, and most would make a 20 minute drive over a 10 minute drive if it meant saving $1k. So the incentive is still there. You can say that I'm valuing money over lives in this example, but I think we'd be picking the lesser of two evils, as it's becoming increasingly evident that socialized medicine is stacking up its own body count. Working with society is all about incentives, and universal healthcare doesn't incentivize excellence, it incentivizes complacency.

What non-emergencies typically bring you to the ED?

Sick kid during the weekend

I needed* to be stitched up at 9 PM. Urgent care could have done it, but they were closed.

Those aren’t mutual exclusive. In fact having healthcare not be gated to the single few that can afford it might accelerate the process of fixing the issues around pricing.

How is the typical person supposed to decide the best path of care? How do you incentivize competition while keeping standards of care up so that people receive good care with highly complex tradeoffs.

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