3rd party payers inflate prices, they enable the first party to charge more for their product or service than they could to cash or private finance buyers. Consider what college tuition would cost without federally backed student loans, would real estate values have bubbled without poor underwriting practices? Low deductible health plans also inflate the cost of healthcare. People need skin in the game if you want to control the cost of anything.
Its even worse than that - we're subsidizing and/or masking (through employer co-funding) the cost to the "demand" side while letting the providers on the "supply" side run wild absorbing all that funding. Medicare reimbursement rates are a partial check on that supply side, but generally inadequate overall. Providers are still free to accept network contract/discount rates or not. Consider the hospital/provider in/out of network shell game that is popular at the moment - Purely providers gaming the setup: divide and conquer.
Pharma has no checks on what they can command. And regarding pharma - pretty sure we're (the U.S.) holding the bag for capped prices in all the other price controlled nationalized medicine countries.
Quote from: ednksu on March 14, 2017, 11:04:58 PM
Quote from: sys on March 14, 2017, 10:00:16 PM
i get tired of people blaming insurance companies. they're just pass throughs, the problem is the doctors.
Not sure if you're joking, but this is amazingly wrong. Insurance companies are becoming very vertically integrated in the healthcare industry with processing and bureaucracy. They are driving up costs and forcing providers and customers into their networks.
While they are becoming the gatekeeper, they're still just a middleman - albeit a very fat one - skimming their 20-30-40%.
