“Doctor-owned hospitals are the most conspicuous manifestation of a culture of entrepreneurship that’s gone a long way toward creating today’s health care crisis. Although traditional economic theory holds that competition drives prices down, in medicine competition had tended to drive prices up…”
Medicine is one of the only markets in which consumers always buy luxury procedures, those that may put them in debt. If it involves my life, I’m taking every avenue available. This bubble has been one of the many reasons that we have the most expensive per capita health care system in the world. Meanwhile, pharmaceutical corporations invest primarily in dietary R&D. And conservatives - always defenders of the free market - decry any mention of single payer, but refuse to offer a plan that would allow me to trade my employer based insurance for another without paying a higher premium. How is it market-based when consumers are punished for choice?
