its true that there is more treatment available, but heres the thing.
its NOT that expensive. an average 10k dollar surgery actually costs,
in terms of materials and salarya and other overhead, maybe 1500.
there is a MASSIVE price increase, because, well, pay or die. and as
medical care as we know it has a monopoly on modern healthcare, thats
not about to change.
That is true, and it is an important contributing factor to rising health-care costs. But the problem could be fixed easily with free-market capitalism. Traditionally, in the US doctors did not make much money. Through the 1940s it was said that the only way a doctor could be rich was to marry money. In Japan they do not make all that much. The reason is obvious: there are lots of medical schools and lots of doctors. The US medical profession artificially limits the number of slots available in medical schools. In any other business that would be considered a violation of the antitrust laws. The Justice Department is not likely to crack down on it under this administration, but who knows what might happen in the future. It would only take 10 or 20 years for the number of doctors to increase enough to reduce the cost of surgery. The recent collapse of the "body scan" industry proves that medicine is not immune to the laws of economics.
Naturally, economic laws operate quite different in medicine than with most other businesses, because the customer's life is at stake. It is an extreme situation. But not that extreme, and not unique or unprecedented. Your life is at stake when you take an airplane trip or drive a car, yet airlines and automakers are clearly at the mercy of the market.
Academic researchers also violate antitrust laws with peer-reviewed journals and the methods they use to allocate funds and grants. Their system is an open invitation to corruption, graft and plagiarism.
- Jed
