A liberal, on how hospitals and doctors can possiby be operating at or below cost:
"So why the hell does anyone think our cost structure reflects what healthcare really has to cost here? The ignorance and logical incompetence are astounding."
See, the great thing about the free market is anyone should be able to answer that question by going down to the corner, hanging a shingle, and getting rich beyond their wildest dreams by simply undercutting everybody else whose service costs more than it supposedly "has to."
But maybe it does "has to" cost this much. Maybe doing the actual medicine part any cheaper just results in higher regulatory fines and higher court costs. Maybe the "has to" problem is that government says providers "has to" deliver a very high, very uniform level of care to stay in business.
Maybe the standard of care is the thing that's unsustainable. After all, aside from some experimental procedures and aesthetics like the quality of the hospital food and in-room cable, isn't the technical standard of care for the poor the same as for the rich? I think they are, which begs the question: Are we all getting a rich standard of care or a poor one?
And I think the cost reflects that we "has to" get a pretty high standard of care. Or, in other words, cheaper care is illegal.
On one side of the coin, it's against the law to victimize the underinsured with substandard care. We value equality more than that. Sounds -- well, fair. But sometimes when you look at the exact same thing in a different light you see that it has other implications: On the other side of the same coin, there are 47 million people for whom it is illegal to purchase the level of care they could afford.
How -- well, equal.
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