No. of Recommendations: 5
The "every other country has this so we should do it, too" or "No other country has this so we shouldn't do it"...again - aren't arguments.
But you're just misunderstanding the argument I made.
This isn't a "should" statement. It's a fact statement. 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. That's not an argument that "everyone else is doing it so we should do it." It's an argument that you have no information about how the market would actually behave under the scheme you're proposing.
I could look up ACL repair surgery. I'd find this: $7,931.
So what? That tells you the price at that one center (and certainly loaded with caveats). 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? One's the cheapest - but is that perhaps because their doctors aren't as good or they have worse outcomes, or have a contract that puts you on the hook for more "unexpected" events than the more expensive one? One's more expensive - but is that because the doctors are better or have better outcomes, or include more possible contingencies in the sticker price? Why would you even bother if this is covered by insurance? 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?
You're trying to argue that no patient would do this research because they have no incentive to. But you know who would? The insurance company, who has every incentive to. They'd do the research for the patients.
They do do that. The insurance companies negotiate these rates. They employ their own medical professionals to help them in those negotiations. 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.
Again, it's not a question of "everyone else is doing it so we should too." 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.
