Quote Originally Posted by Jack Sawyer View Post
Examples in other places say you are wrong, but let's hope you are right.
What do you mean?

I don't follow. What do you mean?
Insurance is efficient for catastrophe. In all the different markets you can think of that have insurance, it is almost entirely purchased for catastophe. All the other elements of those markets are handled in person with up front costs. An example of this is automobiles. People get insurance for catastrophe, and there isn't much for routine care or for consumption of new cars. This is a relatively efficient market. Healthcare doesn't function like this, not because it is different fundamentally (it's not), but because the government has incentivized the market to gravitate towards using insurance for every aspect of the market. The problem with this is that insurance is inefficient for most things. People naturally opt for it despite its inefficiency due to very high costs of low risk catastrophe that people just naturally aren't comfortable with. But people don't opt for insurance for things that are more normal and routine because of how inefficient that would be. In healthcare, it is no different except that government policies have made it so that things organize around insurance for everything despite inefficiencies.

Changing policy properly would make it so that healthcare can be produced and consumed like every other normal thing (like food, clothes, shelter). That would turn healthcare into a market with little insurance (essentially for only catastrophe) and people would shop for desired healthcare upfront. People would pay out of pocket and prices would be upfront. Because of this, efficiency would return to normal and would rival other markets with little government intervention, like food, clothing, and shelter. Costs would be a fraction of what they currently are, employment in the sector would be significantly higher, and the amount of care consumed would also be higher. Quality too would be higher. The way it is now, the price of care doesn't matter that much since the person using is not the person buying. Also the quality of care doesn't matter a whole lot since there is little competition.