People paying for their own medical procedures, at a fixed price. What a concept.
When I had my hernia repair a couple months ago, I actually shopped around, not just for doctors, but for surgery facilities and anesthesiologist. They all coordinated after I made my choices, but I made the decision who would do it and where, and I saved a lot of money over what an insurance company would have paid. The fundamental problem with health care in this country is the complete market disconnect created by employer-provided plans.
Yup. Plus any stay at a hospital includes spreading the wealth cost averaging. Catastrophic insurance would mean only those that use the expensive equipment (or the $100 a pint sterilized water) would actually pay for it.
Why are hospital meals expensive and unpalatable? Because they think they’re NASA. A hospital should actually be a group of businesses that each have to justify their expenses and compete with others in the same building.
Competition. The only thing that works for the consumer.
Pick any field and restructure it so customers are spending from a shared pool or some future pile of cash, instead of directly out of pocket, and watch the price climb year after year. In the US health care and education follow that model, and in Great Britain car repair does (where most cars are company owned and maintained).
Oh, and Ken, my mother was a hospital dietitian. I grew up eating her experimental versions of deflavorized food. Tonight’s sides will be greens with no salt, pork, or butter, applesauce, and green Jell-o. 🙂
I feel for ya George. My mother was the opposite. We traveled a lot, but where ever we ended up we had a restaurant (and FBI, but that’s another story.) She wasn’t just a good cook. We had many people driving eight hours from Los Angeles every weekend just to have dinner in her restaurant. My mother was taught by the Italian method. She wasn’t allowed to measure anything. Instead, grandpa took a taste and whacked her on the back of the head (hard enough to knock her down) if it wasn’t right. This was in Brooklyn, where a choice of the best food in the world was everywhere. Yes, Grandpa was in the mob.
The issue with following recipes to the letter is that the ingredients aren’t always of similar quality or attributes so for optimum results the cook still should sample and examine the food otherwise the results may be rather lackluster. Even a difference in ambient temperature is enough to spoil a dish. Good cooks can adapt and switch ingredients or change the recipe on the fly.
“The issue with following recipes to the letter is that the ingredients aren’t always of similar quality or attributes”
Indeed. And there are other subtlties… I found out the hard way, on my first attempt at a souffle, that there’s a vast difference between a cup of sifted flour, and a sifted cup of flour.
Try finding a good pizza at 7000 ft.
The problems with healthcare are twofold:
1. Prices are rarely available. This is an exceptional case for a reason.
2. Quality is never disclosed. There’s no way to find out which facility or doctor has a superior outcome rate.
So without price or quality information, how are consumers supposed to function? Answer: they can’t. And the AMA likes it that way.
This is happening all over the country. Cash payment for services in the medical field.
I have hopes that this new economic model comes on hard and strong. It would at a stroke (no pun intended) solve the rising price of health care as well as thwart obamacare.
Russian medicine is cash and carry. Where nobody would go to Canada, they do go to Russia for medical treatments (not all of which they should.)
Refusal to submit to most honorable African-American president’s enlightened health care plan be raciss.
My dentist gives a 10% cash discount. Part of that is due to the extra services required by insurance companies.
It occurred to me a while ago that Republicans should seriously think about supporting a free market in health care, as a practical way to lower costs, encourage innovation, and allow more affordable access to more people. Adding more bureaucracy sure isn’t helping on any of these points.
You mean where they throw grandma over a cliff? Those heartless free marketers that want prices to come down for everybody.
Didn’t say it’d be easy. Just that the results would be better than what we’ve got. And far better than what we’re about to get.
And as Brock points out, merely getting the bureaucrats off the industry’s back is only half of it. Effective free markets also need price and quality transparency. The majority of the current medical industry seems deliberately set up to hide price and quality info. It’d likely have to be dragged kicking and screaming into any real transparency.
But given how doctors seem to be reacting to the looming added burden of Obamacare, maybe there’s a bargain to be struck: Grant the industry freedom in exchange for genuine transparency.
Hey, I’ve solved half the problem! Now it’s a simple matter of figuring out how to get this government to fire a large slice of itself and grant the industry freedom. I’ll leave that as an exercise for the student…