Comments on Robert Reich blog post 2

I made several comments on this post by Robert Reich. Here is the next one:

And doesn't it make logical sense that health care should be the most expensive thing there is? It has maximal demand (your body is the most precious thing to you and you would do anything you can to save and heal it) and very constrained supply (becoming a doctor or other healthcare provider is one of the most difficult things to do --- decades of difficult schooling and many sleepless nights in residency, massive debt after finishing, etc.). And as medical progress continually advances, it becomes more and more difficult for someone to master it all and this further constrains supply (a smaller percentage of the population would be able to master the super advanced medicine of today versus the medicine of, say, 50 years ago and this further limits supply). So by basic economics it should rightfully be very expensive, if not the most expensive thing there is to buy. So why are we so surprised that healthcare is expensive?

I know we’d all ideally like to believe that ‘good healthcare is a right of all’ and morally that is a just stance. But unfortunately this desire runs headlong into some inconvenient truths that are just hard facts and cannot be legislated away --- basically, economic markets are just a fact of life whether you like them or not, and you get what you pay for. If the government wants to pay less as a way to hold healthcare costs down, well, they’re simply going to get less or less quality product. Some previous posters said they’d be more than happy to have a Canada like system even if they had to wait longer for care. And of course that is rational, if you can’t afford healthcare now and thus have nothing, even Canada’s flawed system is a godsend for you. But the flipside is that the people who have excellent care now will see the quality of their care erode --- so basically the people with great care and the people with no care will split the difference and meet in the middle and get lousy care. We will be trading quality off for quantity. If you are happy with that, then fine, but you should at least be honest about it; quality versus quantity seems to be our choice.

Real, true competition is the best way we know to get high quality at reasonable cost. This is the essence of capitalistic systems of which our country is the founding father. Why are we trying to forget this now in this debate about healthcare? Why don’t we instead embrace it and use it to its fullest. If there are barriers to real, true competition then take them down (e.g. repeal Mccarran- Ferguson, etc.) Don’t try to solve the problem instead by dictating prices, which will only lead to worse, rationed care.