This is "too big to fail" logic applied to hospitals. How do our basic life services always become captured by huge organizations that are poorly run and require bailouts by the government?
Or is "too big to fail" just a ploy by those organizations to entrench themselves even further in our lives?
Putting on my economist's hat for a second: Services like healthcare inherently have extremely inelastic demand, and are difficult to serve to a large number of people without a large number of resources, which makes it naturally easy to build a monopoly. A monopolicist is incentivized to increase fees and/or reduce spending on the quality of service as long as the demand is inelastic... and here we are.
Admittedly, I never got past ECON 201, so I'm probably wrong on something here.
> Admittedly, I never got past ECON 201, so I'm probably wrong on something here.
I wouldn't worry about it (myself, only ECON 101); after all the people opining the loudest are the ones who have even less ECON than me, nevermind you.
I think one of the largest mistakes made with medical insurance is removing the price visibility. The hospital cannot tell you how much a procedure will cost until after it is done. They can tell you how much it will cost if you pay in cash, so they have a good ballpark figure.
So the consumer buys something without knowing how much it will cost, and is then legally on the hook for paying whatever the cost is. This is broken.
Maybe it's unavoidable in this particular field (medical care), but the one thing you can be sure of when the consumer buys something without knowing how much it costs (and only paying the cost later) is that the price of that thing is going to skyrocket.
Or is "too big to fail" just a ploy by those organizations to entrench themselves even further in our lives?