Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

There are several complex factors but cost disease isn’t one of them. The biggest issue is fixed supply. The number of doctors are artificially fixed via residency funding, hospitals have merged and become monopolistic.

This correlates with wealth bc demand for healthcare is inelastic. People will spend an arbitrarily high amount on it if they have to. But the causation is backwards. Costs aren’t rising because people are spending more. Supply is fixed and demand isn’t.

Food demand is also inelastic! But supply isn’t constrained so prod capability comes online the more that’s spent. Further on the cost disease side, healthcare isn’t inherently labor intensive. It’s illegal to increase the number of doctors or to increase their productivity.

The set of tasks that doctors are legally required to do and that a 2 year training program grad could do just as competently overlap vastly. Ditto for an algorithm.

The food equivalent of healthcare would be capping the number of acres available for agriculture and the number of farmers, mandating that farmers receive years of training, and then have to farm by hand. How much would corn cost in that system?

This is all true, and I also have to point out that price elasticity of demand is a weird thing to talk about re: an industry that is somehow allowed to charge you and/or your exorbitantly paid insurance proxy whatever it wants while refusing to tell you the number before you buy

That’s an excellent point, demand elasticity is actually pretty irrelevant in that system. Lots of people would and do decline operations that are over a certain amount if the benefit is low or risk is high. The true elasticity is probably higher than the current system implies.

Look at what companies like MDsave accomplish purely on the basis of price transparency. Their average procedure cost looks 30-50% cheaper than the standard, which by itself makes the US comparable with Europe if that scaled (charitable “if” there, to be fair).