No. of Recommendations: 3
If you really want to cut medical spending, then there has to be a functioning market with 100% price transparency...forcing health care providers to compete for patients' business. What we have right now is the exact opposite of that.
There's no way that's ever going to work, though.
Health care can't function like a "normal" market. It has two key attributes that prevent that from happening, and ensure that the market can't function propely:
1) The choice of what to buy (and who to buy from) is primarily made by a different person than the one paying the bill.
2) The provider of the medical service has immeasurably different and better information than the person buying it.
That situation can't function like a normal market, and prices are pretty much useless in most contexts. If I (as the patient) am not paying the cost of the service, I am utterly indifferent to differences in price between provider. And I have no way of ever meaningfully determining whether a price is "fair" or not for most medical procedures, treatments, or even products: Doctor A might charge 20% less than Doctor B for the same service, but I as a lay person would never be able to know whether that reflected a real difference in the value of the service being provided or not.
Pricing can't, and won't, meaningfully affect medical spending either.
