Re:When Medical Debt Collectors Decide Who Gets Arrested
by AnthonyMouse on Thursday October 24, 2019 @03:26AM
(#21342442)
> Most things you can shop around for also aren't serious enough to qualify, so you're not entitled to such unpaid sick leave.
But now you're not making an argument for socialized medicine, you're just making an argument for requiring unpaid sick leave for a scheduled medical procedure.
> But also, it's kinda a moot point because laws like that only apply to people that know them or can afford an attourney.
Are there many laws that don't work this way? Would the same people be any better off if the government would pay for their medical procedure but they didn't get it because they didn't know that?
> This assumes that people have both perfect knowledge of their procedure and the prices of all hospitals
Which is the point of requiring price transparency. Your doctor should provide you with a list of all the places that can do the procedure along with their locations and prices and any other information useful to choose between them.
> and that people value money over convenience.
But that is the mechanism by which it operates -- there is a point where the money is worth more than the convenience, and once people actually know the amount of money required, that limits how much providers can overcharge because past that the inconvenience is less than paying the money.
There is nothing wrong with choosing convenience. It's the thing that allows trade offs between price and convenience to exist. Maybe the clinic near the big city will always have the best price because it has the most patients to amortize fixed costs over, so the rural clinic can only stay in business by charging more per patient. If the higher price is worth not having to travel to the city -- and people know that -- then people will choose to patronize it, which is how we know its value exceeds its costs. If everybody chooses to travel to the city for the lower price then we know the rural clinic costs more than it's worth, which is the same mechanism that causes it to fold.
> I know for a fact that I can fly to another country with free healthcare and get a procedure for cheaper than I can get it in the US, but hardly anyone does that regardless. It's just too inconvenient.
Because flying to another country is very inconvenient, and not at all inexpensive on its own. So the limit it places on overcharging is not very strict. Especially when you don't actually know how much you'll be charged, so you don't even realize that it would have been worth it to do that until after it's already done.
The inconvenience is much less to go to another town than another country, so that would provide a much lower limit on how much anyone can overcharge before people would do that. If they were actually provided with the price differences -- so why aren't we doing that?
But now you're not making an argument for socialized medicine, you're just making an argument for requiring unpaid sick leave for a scheduled medical procedure.
> But also, it's kinda a moot point because laws like that only apply to people that know them or can afford an attourney.
Are there many laws that don't work this way? Would the same people be any better off if the government would pay for their medical procedure but they didn't get it because they didn't know that?
> This assumes that people have both perfect knowledge of their procedure and the prices of all hospitals
Which is the point of requiring price transparency. Your doctor should provide you with a list of all the places that can do the procedure along with their locations and prices and any other information useful to choose between them.
> and that people value money over convenience.
But that is the mechanism by which it operates -- there is a point where the money is worth more than the convenience, and once people actually know the amount of money required, that limits how much providers can overcharge because past that the inconvenience is less than paying the money.
There is nothing wrong with choosing convenience. It's the thing that allows trade offs between price and convenience to exist. Maybe the clinic near the big city will always have the best price because it has the most patients to amortize fixed costs over, so the rural clinic can only stay in business by charging more per patient. If the higher price is worth not having to travel to the city -- and people know that -- then people will choose to patronize it, which is how we know its value exceeds its costs. If everybody chooses to travel to the city for the lower price then we know the rural clinic costs more than it's worth, which is the same mechanism that causes it to fold.
> I know for a fact that I can fly to another country with free healthcare and get a procedure for cheaper than I can get it in the US, but hardly anyone does that regardless. It's just too inconvenient.
Because flying to another country is very inconvenient, and not at all inexpensive on its own. So the limit it places on overcharging is not very strict. Especially when you don't actually know how much you'll be charged, so you don't even realize that it would have been worth it to do that until after it's already done.
The inconvenience is much less to go to another town than another country, so that would provide a much lower limit on how much anyone can overcharge before people would do that. If they were actually provided with the price differences -- so why aren't we doing that?