Healthcare Markets

There have been two articles* I have read about market distortions in America's health care market. These distortions, namely the fact that consumers do not ever see or feel the costs of services, prevent cost savings and efficiencies. The arguments are compelling - certainly, the more we see and feel the costs of our care, the better we would be about choosing only the care that is likely to be effective.

However, the more we feel the costs (in other words, the more responsible we are for funding our care), the more likely it is that some people will not be able to afford certain necessary treatments. Maybe the people calling for this are right and that it would be cheaper to have a system where people pay for more of their care, and then have government support for people who cannot afford certain care that is too expensive. I still fear that people would be left out.

Once again we come back to efficiency versus fairness, the two opposing forces in economics. The question here is how inefficient are we (probably an extreme) and how fair are we (still not so fair - yet). Soon I'll have another post that looks more deeply at the health care proposal and how it does deal with the fairness and efficiency concerns.


*A side note - I do not think I am going to renew my subscription to The Atlantic. I get the feeling that they are trying too hard to be provocative and purposefully publishing articles that attempt to contradict "convention wisdom". I do not have a problem with that in general, however the articles that do have that feeling also seem to have a lot of data and arguments that are purposefully misleading - the healthcare article I linked to being one example and their recent marriage articles among other examples.