[quote=ocrenter][quote=harvey]If efficiencies and cost savings led to recessions then most of economic history would have been a recession.[/quote]
Health care doesn’t lend itself to unbridled free market forces. It is beyond easy to scare the client into doing a whole bunch of expensive and worthless treatments and procedures. In fact, client expectation is the expensive stuff. Efficiency can only come about from single payer forcing discipline in cost control.[/quote]
Free markets could solve a lot but not all of the cost side. For example allowing somehow to open an MRI imaging facility assuming they hired the necessary licensed personal would lower the cost of MRIs but Certificate of Need licensing prevents that from happening. Forcing medical providers to post prices would allow customers to shop around.
Forcing medical providers to eat the costs of their own mistakes would help. I.e. if I elect to have knee surgery for an aching knee if I get an infection while under the care of said hospital they would eat the cost of treating the infection and extra days in the hospital but instead they currently get to charge people for that.
Allowing a business that is licensed to purchase drugs in India or somewhere else where the drug company sets them much lower and re-import them here would drastically lower the price of drugs here. These are all free market forces that would lower the cost of health care here.
Forcing health care providers to post prices and always charge that price would effectively lower health care costs. If you want Medicare patients you bill everybody the Medicare price or you choose not to have any medicare patients. If you can’t make if with the medicare patients or without them because you have a lot of debt or outlays you go out of business and somebody buys your assets for pennies on the dollar and can make a profit at the medicare rates.
All of those free market forces would work to lower health care costs. Single payer is just an alternative to that and one that’s likely less efficient. It would probably work and it might involve slightly less disruption.
In the end though Health Care revenue is a component of GDP. If you lower the cost of health care you’ve lower health care revenue and GDP. By definition lower GDP means we’re in recession. Health care primarily is a service provided by people. If you materially reduce health care costs you are most certainly are either laying people off or reducing their salaries by a material amount. This is math not theory.
