Yes, our medical/dental insurance industry has encouraged the attitude of “cost doesn’t matter, because it’s free to you (oh and besides, you can’t put a price on your health, can you, you cheapskate?)” which just serves to constantly let prices grow out of control. This is an instrumental part of how our healthcare costs got so high. It also is why it’s laughable to think of medical care as a free market: you can’t even find out what things cost before you buy most of the time. Not to mention that when you are in need of care, you often don’t have the luxury of shopping around.

What we really need is for people to stop thinking of insurance as a big blanket you buy that reduces the price of things to zero. That’s not what insurance is for. Insurance is supposed to be a system where you still pay for the cost of the good, but that buffers it for you so when you get an outlier cost, it doesn’t break you. It doesn’t make the costs of things go away. On average, you should end up paying a little more than the cost of your healthcare by purchasing it through an insurance plan. A high deductible plan does this: you actually pay the cost of all your healthcare up until a certain point out of pocket, and if you reach a certain amount (which is pretty high, but significantly less than the premiums on a low-deductible plan), the insurance takes over. This makes you actually aware of the prices of things and is healthy. Not to mention the insurance is a hell of a lot cheaper.