Obama Health care plan.

[mrstickball]

FootballFan said:
One thing i don't understand with American health care.

Why is it that American's refuse to pay high prices for consumer good and manufactured products...resulting in a lower price! Gas general food etc etc etc (Which is awsome,just enter a Walmart to see that)

But yet with Health Care the prices are astronomical in comparison with other non national health care countries! Why hasn't the price being slashed like everything else?

Because no one demands lower prices. Very simple :-p

The problem is that competition drives down prices. Wal-Mart is a perfect analogy. They have to compete with millions of other retail and botique stores. That drives down prices, because Wal-Mart is ruthlessly efficient. 

However, with healthcare, there are a few issues:

1. People don't pay for healthcare most of the time. They have deductables, yes, but for the most part, they are unaware of what the real costs are in healthcare. I know theres an anecdotal story about the US healtcare system, but it goes like this: There was a woman a few years back with insurance. She looked at 2 facilities to do a heart surgery for her, right beside eachother. The surgeries were done by nearly the same staff, with the exact same surgeon. One was a major hospital, and the other was a specalist focused only on such surgeries. The hospital fee was $40,000. The medical facility was $20,000. She went with the $40,000. Why? Because it was covered by her insurance.
2. Its not competitive. I worked in the healthcare industry to know a few things about why its bad. The problem is that there are multiple levels of anti-competitive behavior in the market. Doctors unions regulate what it takes to become a doctor, restricting the supply of doctors to the field, increasing salaries and making it less competitive. Government regulates interstate laws for insurance companies so Aetna in Michigan cannot compete with Healthcare Inc in Florida on a policy in Ohio.
3. The FDA has some of the worst restrictions in the world for life-saving medicine. The clinical trials take years and billions of dollars to support before drugs are approved. Those costs are translated directly to consumers in the way of pills that cost hundreds of dollars for a month's supply.

If government could simply increase competition - make insurance companies, doctors, and hospitals actually work and compete for business, the price of healthcare would drop tremendously in America. Dare I say, it could be a lower GDP than many OECD countries.

Heres one way to look at it:

Since you are in England, you enjoy a very simple system. You have 1 nation, and (please correct me if I'm wrong) 1 set of laws determining what it takes to become a doctor, and 1 set of standards for insurance in your country - NHS, or private. In America, we have 1 nation, 1 set of laws determining what it takes to become a doctor, and 50 sets of standards for insurance. That costs time, money, and inefficency.

What is in America is not what you have in England, because we are not like England. We are more akin to what kind of beuraucratic nightmare that would become if you had every nation in Europe band together, keeping all of their own laws, but forcing stands on all countries in only a scant few issues. We have to reform our laws to become more like yours - not in the way of socialization, but in the way of ensuring that people and doctors have the power to deal with 1 form of healthcare legislation and competition and not 50.