HEALTH CARE ISN'T A MARKET: IT'S A RACKET

From Hullabaloo:

The health care costs are too damned high

Brill found hospitals charging $1.50 for a single generic Tylenol, $32 for the rental of a reusable blanket, and $13,702 for a drug that cost the hospital only $400. It's all part of a three-tiered system that offers deep discounts to Medicare and lesser breaks to private insurers but charges uninsured individuals the full internally listed price. 

And

"By following the money, I discovered that our health care prices are out of whack for a reason that was hiding in plain sight - a reason that should be obvious to anyone who has ever been a health care consumer, which means all of us: There is no such thing as a free market in healthcare, if one defines a free market as a place where there is some balance of power between the buyer and the seller. Instead, health care is - except when Medicare is the buyer - a lopsided seller's market. That became clear at both ends of the money trails I followed - from the patients' lack of any knowledge of what they were buying or its prices, much less any leverage to bargain over it, to the sellers' ability and willingness to charge absurdly high prices on everything from gauze pads to ambulance services to cancer wonder drugs."

Many health care experts have studied this for years and Brill very ably synthesizes their work along with his own reporting. But honestly, isn't this just common sense? Of course there cannot be a free market in health care --- the buyer is incapable of making an informed choice and has no idea what the value of what she's buying. This doesn't seem confusing to me, but most people seem to find it extremely complicated requiring study after study. It's quite clear we must do --- set prices. I know that an insult to the Market Gods, and I'm sure I'll be struck dead any minute for even thinking it. But that's what has to happen.

More here. 

No such thing as a "free" market when the buyer can't walk away from the deal.  Like Digby says, it's common sense, although I had to be walked through this myself reading an essay on the topic five or six years ago.  So it's not obvious.  But once you first see it, you always see it: when you need health care, you need it right now, and you can't shop around and find the best deal.  And health care providers are well aware of this.  Consequently, price gouging, on a scale of which I have never even imagined, rules the day.

Health care isn't a market.  It's a racket.  Once the system has you in its clutches, it squeezes until there is no more blood.  You might walk away in somewhat better health, but you're in massive debt for the rest of your life.  And this happens to the insured as well as the uninsured.  The obvious and sane solution is for government to take over and offer health care as a public service, rather than as the massive debt creation machine it now is.  I mean, seeing as how it's not really legitimate business.  But no.  The health care racket has so much money that it's bought off all of Congress and White House after White House after White House.  Obama is only the most recent top official owned by the medical mafia.

And that's why the highly touted "Obamacare," soon to ramp itself into high gear, is such a massive joke: it tinkers around the edges, but it preserves in full that which sucks our economy like a giant vampire while making us the laughingstock of the industrialized world, the crazy notion that health care is "business."

Some liberal he is.

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