Re:How a Medical Catastrophe Can Bankrupt a Life
by emodendroket on Friday February 02, 2018 @05:23PM
(#16294686)
In addition, the "market-based" proposals to address this problem mostly exacerbate it. The suggestion is always that patients need more "skin in the game" -- in other words, that they need to be responsible for even more costs out-of-pocket -- and yet it's completely predictable that fewer people are going to seek preventative care if they have trouble paying for medicine now.
This also ends up being a pretty unfair way to apportion care because a rich man couldn't care less about a $100 fee and a poor man can find it prohibitive.
> In other words, the system complains that people don't do something that the system prevents them from doing.
Uh, this has nothing to do with the system, and mostly everything to do with behavioral economics and risk pooling. People are poor at investing in preventative care, because the benefit is extremely hard to perceive at the individual level. And they over-invest in end of life care, because, well, they don't want to die. That's not the result of "the system", that's human nature. Attempting to build a healthcare system on how we "should" act instead of how we actually do isn't a plan.