"Health care providers don't care about cost - it's passed along to insurance companies and consumers anyway. Insurance companies care about cost, but not really - it's easily passed to sponsoring employers or individual buyers anyway. Really, the only people that truly want cost reduced are the endpoint patients and their employers, who generally lack the clout and influence to push for real cost reductions. The entire system is broken. Costs have not lowered for health care, and will not lower, until the system is reorganized such that cost reduction becomes advantageous to all stakeholders."
I'm not sure if we really agree all that much or not, but I do agree with this. There's no way to keep from ballooning costs when the people paying are insulated from what they're paying for.
Unfortunately, it's largely broken as a result of some really strange incentives and a belief that employers should be responsible for their employees health care (rather than just paying employees and letting them deal with it). HMOs, tax incentives to employers to provide health care, tax incentives to employees to take it, are all terrible, terrible things.
Fixing it will require that people "pay" for what they don't feel they're paying for right now. I dunno about everyone else, but I'd rather be getting the extra $1200/yr my employer contributes to my health care and dealing in an actual free market than what we have now. I think we'd all be paying a lot less, and getting better service.
I'm not sure if we really agree all that much or not, but I do agree with this. There's no way to keep from ballooning costs when the people paying are insulated from what they're paying for.
Unfortunately, it's largely broken as a result of some really strange incentives and a belief that employers should be responsible for their employees health care (rather than just paying employees and letting them deal with it). HMOs, tax incentives to employers to provide health care, tax incentives to employees to take it, are all terrible, terrible things.
Fixing it will require that people "pay" for what they don't feel they're paying for right now. I dunno about everyone else, but I'd rather be getting the extra $1200/yr my employer contributes to my health care and dealing in an actual free market than what we have now. I think we'd all be paying a lot less, and getting better service.