These attempts at pricing transparency seem like another way to put blame on the patient for making "poor choices" when really the system needs to be less complex for the patient. Let auditors & regulators handle pricing and gouging, ideally within a single-payer/public option system.
This is how it is in Canada. Our politicians are currently busy fighting over dental, optical, and prescription drugs [1], and truthfully that's just as baffling— why should going to the dentist be any different than going to the hospital? Is getting eyeglasses somehow "elective"?
It's actually much better than the UK for dentists at least.
Anyway, as a four season bike commuter and mass transit fan, it seems to me that being a slave to automobile manufacturers and oil companies and urban sprawl is the opposite of freedom, but I don't have a century of concerted propaganda on my side for that position, so most people look at me like I have three heads.
Honest answer: because currently my family and I have access to above-average care at below-average wait times due to having money. This will go away necessarily due to math. So asking people who are lucky enough to be in this position to support socialized healthcare is tantamount to asking them to value the lives of randoms more than those of their family.
Manitoba is sending 300 spinal surgery patients to North Dakota because they can't clear the backlog any other way.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/manitoba-surgeries-n...
I could reduce the demand for anything if I'm allowed to arbitrarily raise its price.
Which is exactly why the system is broken. How much are you willing to spend to not die? Healthcare is one of those things that markets just aren't good at setting prices for. The demand curve is a wreck. I think the US has proved conclusively that a market based approach is a mistake.
Of course most health care is not an immediate life or death situation. Most of it is for chronic issues or routine "well care" where you would have ample time to compare prices at different providers, if there were a straightforward way to do that.
Your arm is broken and was put in a splint. To get the splint removed properly you gotta go back to the hospital for them to saw it off (and xray to determine it's a good time to saw the thing off). You're gonna... shop around and compare prices for this routine? I mean, you HAVE to get the splint off or your arm will rot off, plus, your quality of life is reduced with it on. "The Market" is armed with the knowledge that you've gotta get the thing off. Even with a couple hospital "options," the hospitals and insurance companies can collude (implicitly or otherwise) to charge basically whatever they want for the operation. The question isn't, what's a fair price, the question is, how much of this person's income can we extract before they'll risk cutting the thing off themselves.
It seems irrational to try to justify this environment when considering the needs of the citizenry. All signs point to methods of organizing healthcare that take as much power as possible from "the market" (which just means whoever can form oligopoly), be that by having a single payer system or by simply nationalizing healthcare.
As GP pointed out there are a myriad of medical/diagnostic codes, and variety of scenarios that could turn something like a baby delivery from a $5,000 affair into a $500,000 affair. Do we really expect that patient to accurately compare all the medical/diagnostic codes between providers to determine if they're getting gouged or not? Would it even be ethical to take a baby out of a NICU to try to save $50,000? We need to stop acting like healthcare is like buying a car or buying Fruity Pebbles from the store.
People aren't going bankrupt because they spent an extra $100 on a wellness visit. They're going bankrupt because of needed care that was very expensive, and even cutting the price in half or by 2/3rds would've still resulted in them going bankrupt. I guess with pricing transparency they can more confidently find out they can't afford it anywhere.
However that does not apply to medicine, see epipen scandal. prices can be inceeased infinitely.
Also Many medicines enjoy patent protection and thus have no competition,
You're making a good argument against something no one has proposed.
The point of this effort is to be able to know the cost of something before you buy it.
That's it!
How this can "seem like another way to put blame on the patient" is pretty incomprehensible.
Do you also consider stores having price information bad?
Would it be better if I went to Target, picked what I wanted, and then got a bill with the surprising cost 3 weeks later?
> It feels like a non-solution solution to access to healthcare.
That's correct. It addresses a different problem.
And the problem is less about what you claim (although some of the claim is valid). The core problem with required/not-required dichotomy is that cheap preventative care visits are not required, but expensive emergency care is, hence the average cost approaches the latter as people substitute the former for the latter.
> In 1986, Congress enacted the Emergency Medical Treatment & Labor Act (EMTALA) to ensure public access to emergency services regardless of ability to pay.[1]
[1] https://www.cms.gov/regulations-and-guidance/legislation/emt...
The free market works great for things like Lasik surgery and cosmetic surgery. Patients shop around, get referrals, make a call and pay.
The problem in the US is that's not free market. How can it be a free market if the price isn't posted or isn't known until after the purchase? How can it be a free market if people with good insurance don't care about the cost because they only pay some insignificant portion of it?
Discount laser eye surgery has its own issues with deceptive advertising, misleading pricing, patients being rushed & not fully informed of potential side effects or receiving poor post-op care. People really need to research thoroughly before using a coupon for their laser eye surgery. No one should expect the market to just provide a quality product. That's foolish thinking.
And many of those issues of rushing patients and not explaining risks happens in public systems too. You think doctors work for free in those systems?
And in terms of quality you’d be a fool to not check even in a public system. I worked in the healthcare field and quality of doctors varies widely.
