No. of Recommendations: 3
This isn't a "should" statement. It's a fact statement.
And if it was a "Fact" that every other teenager in town smokes weed that's the right way to go?
Since no other country has the pricing scheme you're talking about, you have no way of knowing whether it would or would not reduce costs.
You mean other than the 400 years or so of the history of human economics applied across the globe?
That tells you the price at that one center (and certainly loaded with caveats).
So? It's a starting point. If one place at one end of town offered $7500 and the other place offered $25,000 I'd at least be motivated to talk to the $7500 place so I could determine if the deal was right for me.
And if another center offered the procedure for $7,352, and a third offered the procedure for $8,371...how would you pick between them? How would you know which of the three is the right choice?
So you're saying...there is a potential market for a health consultant to explain to me the difference? And then charge me $1 less than $1,019 bucks (because I'd still be better off than if I chose the more expensive option blindly). You're making my case for me :)
And why would the insurance company bother giving the patient incentives to pick between them and pick up the administrative costs (and legal jeopardy) that would accompany such a system?
Huh? Insurance companies want to maximize efficiency across their systems, realize lower costs and have healthier outcomes for their patients. On that last point, why, you might ask? Simple: Because people with better outcomes are healthier and require less follow up care. And that means lower outlays for the insurance companies.
Which is why there's almost no real benefit to making prices transparent to patients (because the patients don't need to know them), and there's no opportunity to make prices more transparent insurers (because the insurers already know them). Which is why you won't have any material savings with any of these pricing transparency efforts.
And that's worked out so very well, hasn't it? There are more reasons for point pricing information. One, we can better track where dollars are going into the system and for two insurance companies can offer different tranches of products to meet market needs based on the open, transparent pricing.
Tranche 1: Here's a plan for X dollars per month and it gives you access to these Toyota hospitals, where they offer Camrys, Corollas and Rav4s.
Tranche 2: Here's a plan for Y dollars/month and it gives you access to these Lexus hospitals, where they offer LFAs, RZs and IS 500's.
It's that there's little reason to think that consumers would be able to "solve" the problems of radical information asymmetry and third-party payment with more information, and the absence of any real-world systems demonstrating otherwise means there's no counterexamples to show otherwise.
Other than the entire history of economics in literally every other market that's ever been a marketplace in the world. Other than that your point is a good one. But ever since Danish Tulips we've known about how markets work. Each is a little different, but all follow a few universal rules that help drive pricing to its optimum point. Or, at the minimum, put incentives in place to help get there.
We also have reams of data on socialized medicine. I'm taking it easy on you by not noting how the US has 3x more MRI machines per capita than the Canadians do, for example.
