Ode to the health care consumer

Posted on | September 28, 2007 | Comments Off

I have friends in Minnesota. Sometimes they send me news stories.

Recently, one of them sent me this one because they thought I’d be interested. They were right.

I’m interested because it gives me an opportunity to indulge in that most obnoxious of pastimes: the dispensing of I told you so’s.

You see, here’s something I’ve been saying for a long time: if you’re concerned about access to health care and you want to find some way to bring down the costs of health care (as opposed to health insurance), then one of the things you need to do is to stop erecting barriers between consumers and costs.

When people have to start caring about the costs, then they start behaving like consumers again, don’t they?

They don’t just run off to have that procedure done at the first place that crosses their mind or their walking fingers as they stroll through the Yellow Pages. They start doing a bit of comparison shopping to find the best deal.

And the medical facilities at the receiving end of this consumer behavior start doing predictable things like making those prices more transparent (because consumers who call looking for prices and end up talking to people who don’t know the prices also end up not making appointments) and even (gasp!) lowering their prices to be more competitive.

They can do that because, in many cases, those prices were inflated to begin with — for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is the encourage of insurance companies.

And, voila! Suddenly and amazingly, health care costs start to come down. This is the market functioning like it’s supposed to.

Which would seem to prove the point I’ve been howling into the wind for years now: get the insurance company out from between patients and procedures, and you give those health care costs a reason to come down.

If we’re going to talk health care policy, then we need to get our terminology right. Bringing down the costs of health care isn’t hard; just make people aware of the costs involved by forcing them to have more of a responsibility for paying them. Bringing down the costs of health insurance might be more of a challenge.

Note to policy makers: don’t make that challenge more difficult by confusing the two.

[tags]health care costs, health insurance, health care policy, microbusinesses[/tags]


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Category: Politics, The Economy


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