One of the big problems facing everyone in the US is the cost of healthcare: it’s expensive and getting more so. Obamacare is supposed to be an attempt to lower the overall cost of healthcare, but by approaching it from the “insurance” angle, it’s likely to make the situation worse rather than better. The Anti-Gnostic reposted an extended comment from Steve Sailer’s blog explaining why misunderstanding the purpose of insurance is a big problem:
1) Most people lose money on insurance, because most of the time insurance doesn’t pay out more than it takes in.
2) Thus, a “good” policy is a catastrophic-coverage-only, high-deductible policy, where most payments are out of pocket. This is a policy that protects you against the downside risk, but where you lose a lot less on average.
3) This is because the purpose of insurance is to protect yourself from *catastrophe*, not to make routine purchases.
4) For example, if you went to Best Buy and whipped out your home insurance card to get a new flat screen TV, everyone would look at you as a crazy man. “Don’t you know that home insurance is only for fires and floods, and not for routine purchases?”
5) And so it should be with health insurance, because you’ll actually — *provably* — pay less with a high deductible plan for all but catastrophic conditions.
6) Indeed, the most innovative and technologically advanced areas of medicine are ambulatory areas in which people feel that markets are “ok”. These are paradoxically the most trivial areas: lasik, plastic surgery, dermatology, dentistry, even veterinary medicine.
7) Why are these areas so advanced? Because people pay cash money, because they choose based on quality, and because they are *able* to choose — i.e. they aren’t being wheeled up to the hospital in a gurney in a no choice scenario.
8) Moreover, with every technology ever, from cars to cell phones to air travel to computers, things that start out expensive become cheaper when enough people demand them. With medicine it seems to bite more that money means differences in care. But at the end of the day doctors, patients, nurses, drugs, ambulances…all that stuff means real resources, and a refusal to do explicit computations just results in massive waste as costs are shunted to a place where no one looks at them.
At the Independent Institute blog, John Graham points out that — in the few places that government allows free markets to operate — prices tend to drop over time even while services or features improve:
It has taken a long time, but the price of hearing aids is in the process of falling dramatically. How has this happened? Technological innovation, of course, but there is more. There’s no shortage of technological innovation in U.S. health care. However, because third-party payers, that is, health insurers and governments, determine prices, there is no mechanism for customers to signal value to providers.
This is not the case for hearing aids: Although some states have mandated insurance coverage for hearing aids, this is usually limited to disabled children. The big market for hearing aids is seniors, and Medicare does not cover hearing aids.
This is another case of a phenomenon observed elsewhere by Devon Herrick of the National Center for Policy Analysis [PDF]: Where patients pay directly for medical care, prices fall like they do in every other market.
Seniors who want highly personalized service from an audiologist in his own practice can get it, and they will pay for it. Those who want to order online can save money by doing that. Those who want to get their old hearing aids repaired can make that choice. And the most adventurous seniors, who don’t mind running an earpiece into an iPhone, can get a functional hearing aid almost for free.
We are on the verge of enjoying universal access to hearing aids — but only because the government restrained itself from interfering, and let the market operate.
