> If we got rid of health insurance, prices would necessarily drop to levels where patients could simply pay for health services.
Or they could keep prices high and "the poors" could just go die...?
Based on recent history I wouldn't bet against that outcome.
The root problem with healthcare in the US in general (with lots of blame to go around for the insurance industry, the healthcare industry itself, politicians, etc) is that we treat it like a commodity with elastic demand when in many situations it isn't, getting rid of health insurance (as terrible as it often is in practice here) with no other safety net in place would likely just make this situation far worse for the majority of people (basically anyone who isn't independently wealthy and suffers any kind of medical condition or emergency).
The right way to think about this is that right now, "health insurance" is a subscription service to Healthcare, and is treated like one.
The problem is that due to highly variable costs between people, everyone has to play games to try to sucker everyone else into paying their fair share, because if they don't, they don't get paid at all.
Reworking health insurance to be insurance would fix this. HSAs are a step towards this, but not enough of a step to start seeing consumers actually change behavior based on price.
Or they could keep prices high and "the poors" could just go die...?
Based on recent history I wouldn't bet against that outcome.
The root problem with healthcare in the US in general (with lots of blame to go around for the insurance industry, the healthcare industry itself, politicians, etc) is that we treat it like a commodity with elastic demand when in many situations it isn't, getting rid of health insurance (as terrible as it often is in practice here) with no other safety net in place would likely just make this situation far worse for the majority of people (basically anyone who isn't independently wealthy and suffers any kind of medical condition or emergency).