Same thing for new medications: they are not permitted in the clinic unless there is a genuine advantage for the patient.
All this is of course due to political circumstances: medicine is just too profitable.
No. Medicine in inelastic. There is no such thing as a rational demand side, as you don't get to choose if you need healthcare or not. When demand is inelastic, and supply is limited, prices will rise accordingly with no relief in sight.
The solution? Either set market prices (at the cost of stifling supply) or flood the market with supply (using technology to both drive down costs and replace what people do).
Also, the money the US spends on healthcare could be better spent educating the people who will otherwise drop out of high school, which drastically reduces their life expectancy (since they can't read so good, have trouble getting jobs which don't involve selling meth, and otherwise have terrible lives).
It's all about how we allocate this labor, I guess. Paying everyone the same salary leads to underperformance, so we encourage competition. I'm sure there's a better way, but it probably won't be a total reversal, only a modification, of what we have.
and someone does indeed do those things, but imagine if there isn't anyone to do it because everyone is so well educated that it's "beyond" them. Those jobs will "get done" initially at a higher price, but then because there's profit to be made, a smart individual will inevitably invent a machimne to the job, and thus, the total output of society increases (sure there's a turbulent period of transition, but that's acceptable in the grand scheme of things).
And we don't need more crime.
For example, if you eliminate traffic accidents (of which the US has many due to it's low density), US life expectancy is near the top globally.
Not being able to select healthcare based on price means nothing checks rising prices. Regulations have made healthcare into a cartel where members won't compete to be affordable.
Right. And there were a lot of famines in the past. It's only by "flood[ing] the market with supply (using technology to both drive down costs and replace what people do)" that we've managed (in the West, at least) to ensure that most people no longer have to worry about food.
Another way of stating this, is that edible commodities are just as fungible as all other commodities. If Egyptians could afford to purchase enough wheat to feed themselves, they would.
That's not true in many cases. I bump my head or get a sore throat, I can choose to seek medical treatment or not. There are also lots of things like "yearly checkups", etc...
What happens when you try to "walk off" something you think is minor, and you're in the ER 24-72 hours later? Hello $20K-$50K bill.
My wife and I were in a car accident a year ago (someone turned in front of us while we were doing 40mph). My wife required an ambulance for transportation due to damage to her right foot. The ambulance didn't exactly let us compare prices and pick which hospital to go to.
I've now had to pay several thousand dollars out of pocket for my wife's physical therapy, MRIs, and prosthetics, and have been told I will need to sue State Farm to recoup my out of pocket expenses.
If I get into a car accident, or if my intestine ruptures, do you think I want the person on the other end of 911 to have to deal with which ambulance provider I picked out or which ER I have on my list of approved locations? No. I want the closest ambulance to take me to the closest ER, and I want the first doctor available to take a look at me. Then, if need be, I want the first ER room open.
Assuming you have a reasonable doctor and let yourself be guided by his recommendations, your bump-on-the-head visits are going to be an hour of you waiting in the waiting room, and five minutes of a nurse taking your blood pressure and the doctor asking you a couple of questions. Billing their time at $240 / hour, you've used up $20 of medical resources, plus a few bucks for the gloves and popsicle sticks they use during the exam.
If every man, woman, and child in the US went into the doctor every month for a bump or a cough, the total cost would be significant in absolute terms -- $72 billion -- but insignificant in the grand scheme of things; $72 billion is less than 3% of current US healthcare spending.
Fantastically incorrect! A good portion of medicine is elastic. If you have the sniffles you don't NEED to see a doctor but many people choose to because they can. If you tear your ACL you don't NEED surgery to continue to stay alive but you sure do WANT it.
Furthermore let's just suppose that the demand is fixed and won't change. Demonstrably false but let's just try. Okay. Publishing of prices can still shift that demand from one particular vendor to another depending on price. Just the same as the demand for TP is largely fixed but purchases can be shifted from Target to Wal-mart to Costco depending on price.
Very, very few illnesses are so outrageously life threatening that they have to be performed RIGHT NOW at WHATEVER hospital you're at. That's mostly limited to trauma type stuff from accidents of various kinds.
For everything else like seeing the doctor for the flu, broken bones, joint problems, diabetes, heart disease, etc etc etc you could certainly spend 15 minutes on the internet. And for many of those things you could afford to spend a whole weekend or three if you wanted. For example once you've got an insulin prescription for the next X days/weeks/months you've got tons of time to shop for a doctor that you would like, or who offers a better price, etc rather than the first doctor you can manage to get yourself to.
Government regulations about not advertising prices blind consumers to the costs of procedures, so hospitals have little reason to lower prices.
It's another case where a small dose of regulation is worse than strict regulation or no regulation.
I'm glad to see another chip in the the foundation of these business models.
Europeans come in two flavors, smug, and really really smug. When will you all get off your high horses?
I think I should say it again because it bears repeating. The country that you just compared america to, implying we are not civilized and germany is, literally attempted to take over the world and exterminate an entire race of people. Civilized? Really?
At least our country was on the right side.
See:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Germany
* http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9196396...