exthrower wrote:
The only way to lower costs in through competition. I just phoned around for a dental procedure and saved 50%....
Which works, because a lot of dentistry is not covered by insurance and you are presumably talking about a defined procedure and can pick when and where it is done.
But a lot of medical decisions are not subject to effective price competition. If you think you are having a heart attack, you're not going to phone around to different hospitals to find the cheapest emergency room, whether or not you have insurance. If you have a strange pain in your abdomen, you won't phone around to find the doctor who will diagnose you the cheapest or promise to do the fewest tests and just guess at the problem in order to save you money.
And, as the system is now, nobody would ever give you a price over the telephone for an emergency room visit for chest pains or for diagnosing your strange pain in the abdomen because nobody knows the cost. It's a fee-for-service model and they can't tell you what services might be provided and the fee varies by who is paying it. And doctors and other providers don't know what the fees are to begin with.
It's fine to say that there needs to be competition, but you have to address situations like that.