He said free clinics.
In addition, doctors aren't the only cost centers in health care either. Even if they're free, which is sort of already the case or fairly inexpensive for the insured in the US, the overall cost of healthcare will still be high.
Plus if you want completely free clinics (everything from doctors to medicine, etc), then you're not talking about a market solution to the issue, which is completely fair too. No one said you have to use a free market solution for this problem.
My point is that we can't expect a free market to solve this issue. It isn't as simple as supply and demand.
It really is that simple.
Giving people insurance without actually increasing the supply of doctors or clinics increases the number of people willing and able to seek treatment. It does nothing for lowering costs of said treatment. Per basic economics, that’s shifting the demand curve (i.e., increasing demand).
With no changes to supply that leads to higher prices. So every time the government makes a new program or expands anny existing one that provides insurance coverage, costs for everyone will go up.
In contrast, my proposal for explicitly bringing in doctors and creating clinics increases supply. People who would have gone to see a doctor elsewhere may now choose to go to this new free clinic.
The demand curve itself would not change, though with the lower cost due to the supply curve shift you would have a larger overall market.
This is clearly oversimplified. There’s some second order effects where if primary care market increases, you’ll need more X-rays and CAT scans. So there could be an increase in those prices. But that’s could be solved in the same way too.
I think in countries where the health care costs aren't as astronomically high as the US there is some form of government intervention to distort the market. And the original post is more or less arguing for a market distortion that doesn't rely on simple price signals to bring costs under control. But that is very different than what has happened in Denver's housing market.
If that expenditure does impact health insurance costs, then the rebuttal given above about increasing the supply of doctors not improving affordability fails.
If you google [National Health Expenditure spreadsheet], there's an annual spreadsheet that has includes an incredible amount of detail about where we spend money, broken down in a variety of different ways.
I think we are talking past each other. My argument is not that lower prices for medical services wouldn’t lead to lower insurance costs. My argument is specifically that increasing supply doesn’t necessarily lead to lower prices for medical services. It would be quite a finding if US cities with more doctors per capita have cheaper medical services but if anything the opposite is true