[quote=greekfire]
DaveLJ:
I sympathize with your personal experience with healthcare. I have also lost many members of my immediate family to cancer and know firsthand that it is not a fun thing to deal with.
I have appreciated your posts over the years, but I couldn’t help but notice, in this latest thread, that you made the assertion that improvements in healthcare technology equated to an increase in prices. Please let me better understand your logic behind this assertion as I was under the impression that improvements in technology generally equated to a decrease in prices.
Another area of your logic that I question is the point at which prices of healthcare will decrease. You mentioned at the tail end of your last post that “Costs will escalate until care is rationed at the high (cost) end.” I read that to mean that the cost of healthcare at the high end will decrease if it is rationed, or reduced.
My question to you is would not a rationing (decrease) in the supply of healthcare at the high (cost) end lead to an increase in prices rather than a decrease, based upon the simple law of supply and demand?[/quote]
You raise a good point, so let me be more clear. Advancements in technology have made medical care more affordable at the “low end.” For example, I’d bet that the cost of providing simple x-rays and vaccinations, etc. are less expensive than they were 40 years ago. But…
… the problem is that these efficiencies are more than offset by advancements at the “high end” (that is, high-cost procedures that weren’t even available 40 years ago). So, again, to use the example of my parents, the $600,000 that was spent on giving them each an extra year of life wasn’t even an option 40 years ago, so “Society” wasn’t forced to pay for it. Today, however, due to advances in medical technology, there are all sorts of expensive procedures that are covered by Medicare and private insurance that weren’t even options 40 years ago. And many of these procedures extend life by a limited amount of time and/or are of limited efficacy.
So, to get to your question, overall medical costs would be reduced if certain (expensive) procedures were simply made unavailable to the population at large, because “we the people” would not be paying for them. So, yes, the cost at the high end will decline if it is rationed because these procedures will be unavailable – we simply won’t pay for them. And, no, there would be no increase in prices because the services would simply not be made available. To use a specific example, the price to Society of “treating” folks with pancreatic cancer would decline dramatically because we simply wouldn’t treat them – they would die before spending god-only-knows-how-much money on them.
