alt Hacker NewsIn a market with perfect competition, perhaps. Healthcare is far closer to a monopoly. Since people can't decide not to be sick, it means you can pocket the cost-saving.
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>it means you can pocket the cost-saving
Right up until a competing hospital that charges substantially less for "close enough it doesn't matter" quality of service opens up in the same area?
Or right up until an equivalent specialist sets up shop in the strip mall across the street from you, brings the GP in house and can see people in one visit.
Oh, those things don't happen you say?
From do-gooders regulating right into the hands of waiting industry lobbyists to inelastic demand healthcare is an absolute poster child for perversion of the free market.
High finance will put solar panels on your roof and structure it so you pay nothing. The degree to which administrative overhead is washed away by technology would have been unfathomable in 1990.
A sketchy concrete crew that doesn't even speak english will show up wearing matching company attire and execute a job planned and timed to a degree of precision that was reserved for huge corporations 40yr ago.
Yet healthcare has resisted all of the advances of the past 40yr. In fact we pay more for it. Every advancement is absorbed by the system.
Why is that?
Healthcare is indeed the poster child for inelastic demand