[Xenophon]

Originally Posted by TheLongshot

Not mine. Empire BCBS is for profit. The previous time I had BCBS it was Anthem, which is also for profit.

Fascinating. Empire BCBS is indeed a for-profit these days -- seems weird to me, 'cause all the Blues I've ever dealt with were non-profits. See this paper for a fascinating discussion of how the conversion from non-profit to for-profit came to pass for Empire BCBS.

Anyway, my BCBS insurer is non-profit as are most (but not all) such.

Originally Posted by TheLongshot

Which tells me that there is something out of whack and it isn't just Uncle Sam that is to blame. Maybe if we do go to single source, maybe we can get to the equalibrium, if it is where the economist thinks it is.

The point of his/their analysis is that the high prices on the non-government side are an inescapable consequence of the under-payment on the price-controlled side of the health-care system. The fact that it's Uncle Sam doing the underpaying doesn't actually matter to the analysis -- the effect would be the same due to underpayment by any very large player that can require providers to deal with them in spite of underpayment.

Dropping back to that equilibrium would not fix the entire problem, however, even assuming that the economist calculated it correctly. We still have plenty of other problems to address as well.

Originally Posted by TheLongshot

[SNIP discussion of payment times & hassles]
Some do as you say, but I do think there are some that try to take advantage of the system, since the motivation in capitalism is to try to get as much profit as possible for your shareholders (for those companies that have shareholders, that is.) Certainly, doctors are mostly trying to get by and are the ones paying a lot for the byzantine system that we have now. While they certainly make money, it comes at a lot of pain that some just don't want to deal with. There are plenty of articles out there about the low job satisfaction of doctors.

Things do need to change in this country about health care and I think there is a lot to be learned from other countries about how they take care of the health of their people.

Here's a simple change that might help -- provide easy access to information on costs and outcomes of various procedures and therapies. That information needs to be in a form that can be compared across providers, too!

Have you ever attempted to compare either prices or outcomes on health-care choices? I have. It's incredibly difficult to get the information you would need to make rational choices! Regardless of how much you might want to make sensible use of healthcare resources, it's tough to make decisions in an information vacuum.


Xenophon