Imagine if health insurance was like car insurance, with radio adds telling you how much you can save. Imagine a world where you can get MRI's or CAT scans done for cheap in a strip mall with total price transparency, something like "MRI's are us", instead of requiring people to go through a primary or a specialist. No one company could sustain predatory practice without another company lowering their price to eat their market share.
Too true. The few times I or a relative had to visit the ER, I got an outrageous $1,000+ bill for minor things (like suture, stuff like that). I always called them, told them to fuck off, and they basically said "If you can pay $~300 we're good".
It just feels like they're desperate to get any payment because I assume a lot of people just don't pay at all, and they have to eat the cost.
1. The biggest problem with American health care is access to coverage - publishing prices or helping pay deductables does absolutely nothing when your insurance company refuses to reimburse or refuses to cover in the first place. Deductables don't bankrupt people, uninsured cancer does.
2. The exorbitant cost we pay is caused by a predatory, rent-seeking insurance industry extracting value from the whole process.
Only medicare for all solves both of these problems!
(Finally and hilariously, the article touches on the example of LASIK, which - free of the insurance industry, as none of them cover it! - has allowed market forces to bring up the standard of care while simultaneously lowering the price on average.)