What Happens When Doctors Only Take Cash

reason.com

5 points·kyleblarson··3 comments

Interesting article. Seems that many standard operations cost half as much under this model.

The problem is that with medical problems you often don't have time to shop around, and if things go bad, you need a whole bundle.

I think there is no way of getting around insurance, with the single payer model demonstrably being best. We seem to have a system that is half-way between private and single payer, with inefficiencies that nether pure model has.

It does have the great advantage, however, of maximizing health industry corporate profits, and that in turn leads to lots of campaign contributions.

I think as usual there needs to be a compromise. Insurance for catastrophic stuff like ER visits and chronic illness. Then pay cash for routine stuff like doctor's visits and prescriptions. For the indigent we can set up publicly funded HSAs and catastrophic coverage.

This way the medical profession will not have to deal with the insurance companies nearly so much. In addition this will increase competition between generic drug manufacturers since they will be dealing with millions of customers rather than a couple hundred insurance companies.

Although I do admit I love my HMO. If I didn't have access to quality health insurance through my employer I would definitely follow the plan above.

Why not some kind of finance industry for some medical procedures. You could embed some kind of life/disability insurance in the financing to cover certain issues.

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