Skyrocketing health insurance premiums are pushing patients and Obamacare enrollees to The Surgery Center of Oklahoma (the “Free market-loving, price-displaying, state-of-the-art, AAAHC accredited, doctor owned, multispecialty surgical facility in central OK), explains the center’s director Dr. Keith Smith in the CNBC video above.
Dr. Smith and his clinic are members of a growing network of market-based medical providers that belong to the Free Market Medical Association, a national group “dedicated to bringing together physicians, surgeons, providers, facilities, and support businesses; providing necessary resources to promote a successful industry; and defending the practice of free market medicine without the intervention of government or other third parties. The association’s website provides the interactive “Free Market Map” below with the following statement: “Our members represent a new movement in healthcare. Price competition works to increase quality and lower cost in every market, and our members are competing to lower the cost of health care. We are all working together to drive down the cost of healthcare and increase the quality of care accessible by everyone.” Each symbol on the map represents a clinic, hospital or medical practice that offers market-based medicine with transparent pricing.
Forgive my smirk when reading that physicians and surgeons, cartelized up to the eyeballs, are participants in a medical free market.
This is a good thing, but two things need to be understood.
1. Putting prices on a website doesn’t do much because only the uninsured actually shop for medical care. Insurers individually negotiate prices with providers in most circumstances.
2. Why does the GOP block all-payer everywhere that its proposed. All-payer, in practice in Maryland, mandates that all providers charge the same price to all patients…they can’t charge $1,000 to blue cross and 10,000 to some self insured plan.
* this ends price discrimination, and Maryland has seen less medical cost growth than any state but Hawaii since the 1970s (Hawaii basically has a private single payer, where HMSA crams down prices).
So, deal? You’d get price transperity everywhere
When it comes to economics, there are always two possible avenues: libertarian or authoritarian.
We know from centuries of experience that economic freedom produces market competition that lowers prices and improves quality. We know that economic authoritarianism does the opposite.
So, we can choose to eliminate the many authoritarian elements of the American system, like physicians licensing and price controls, or we can impose an even more authoritarian system, such as you propose. Personal preference between the two choices reflects the personality of the chooser. Some people prefer monopolistic, authoritarian systems wherein bureaucrats make most of the choices, and some people like variety and the responsibility for choosing. Is government a parent or a guardian against force and fraud.
The American medical system is a massively regulated authoritarian mess in which the price mechanism — indispensable to suppliers and consumers — has been all but obliterated. One can call such a centrally controlled system socialism or fascism, but it clearly doesn’t work. There is still some room for competition at the fringes, such as this blog entry describes. The authoritarians want to obliterate even that small degree of market freedom and consumer choice.