What do you think of this proposal for reforming our health care system?
My opinion of it can be summed up pretty easily: I think he’s making the error that most naive commentators do. He believes in the “true price” theory of pricing.
What do you think of this proposal for reforming our health care system?
My opinion of it can be summed up pretty easily: I think he’s making the error that most naive commentators do. He believes in the “true price” theory of pricing.
never make it out of committee
Only read a bit of it. The administrative time and costs for what he wants would be huge just with what I did read. Was there anything in it worth reading? Sounds like another person who knows nothing about health care but he is a financial whiz so he must be right.
Steve
I agree. Superficially, it sounds workable and maybe even an improvement but when you look at it more closely its problems are enormous. The short version is that rather than a single-payer system it’s a single-underwriter system in which over time the federal government will come to own all property.
Among the things he doesn’t understand
– the large percentage of consumption that is producer-driven
– information isn’t enough to create price discipline
– without price discipline prices can rise high enough that no one will be able to afford health care without the federal government backstop
His Medicaid provision alone would provoke mass social resistance. He doesn’t seem aware a large chunk of the program pays for nursing homes, hospice, etc and makes no provision for the millions who would be suddenly cut off.
A subject about which I should write. No one really knows what percentage of those who are over 65 and on Medicaid have taken actions deliberately to become eligible for Medicaid’s long-term care benefits. Estimates vary.
Perhaps the real scandal is how large a percentage of Americans are just barely getting by. Not poor but will inevitably become poor when they’re too old to work.
It could happen to me and the time when I’m no longer able to work is in the not terribly distant future.
Snicker bars are supposed to list the ingredients and nutritional values accurately, but that has no affect on my Snickers consumption.
Listing every price and every permutation of that cost will have the opposite effect. Few people are going to whip out a spreadsheet to decide where, or if, to get a broken leg fixed.
The moral is that I am not going to change my behavior just because I am more knowledgeable, and I am not going to spend hours comparing prices to save a few pennies.
It is also highly likely that in the healthcare system prices will change frequently enough to force me to recalculate every healthcare decision.