You might be amused, informed, or depressed by this post at Pro-Market on how politics drives the cost of health care in the United States:
Americans spend significantly more on health care than any other country. Why? Economists’ answers to this question (of which there are many) range from opaque pricing to hospital monopolies to “creeping consolidation†to pharmacy benefit managers to medical licensing to Medicare being unable to negotiate drug prices to abusive IP practices by pharmaceutical firms.
Politics is another, seemingly obvious factor. The federal government is responsible for nearly a third of all health care spending, and the health care industry is the biggest spender of lobbying dollars in Washington: as health spending ballooned from $1 trillion in 1996 to $3.4 trillion in 2016, the industry—led by pharmaceutical firms and hospitals—spent nearly $7 billion on lobbying legislators. And as any person who follows the news even a little can tell, health care is one of the most heavily politicized policy issues in the United States today. Thanks to its complicated and impenetrable nature, the American health care system is also replete with so-called pork barrel projects, meant to appease hesitant legislators by providing money or jobs to their districts, thus potentially aiding in their reelection.
Who benefits from the extraordinary degree of politicization of our health care system? Not patients.
What would a less politicized health care system look like? Beats the heck out of me. It’s tempting to suggest that it would be much more centralized, more consolidated but I suspect that such a system would just be politicized in a different way.
Forcing all medical providers to publish prices on the Web would be a good beginning that would lead to myriad improvements in short order.
Jimbino: Good idea but easy to obfuscate costs.
Nope to the above. When prices have been published on the web people mostly just ignore them. Multiple studies on this. If you talk with sick people on a regular basis you begin to understand why that is true.
Steve