Our healthcare “system” operates via a Byzantine system of price hikes, price discounts, different pricing for different customers, and an immense web of middlemen who operate it all. The complexity and the middlemen will always keep prices higher than they otherwise would be. Always.
Our irrational system causes immense personal harm and misery, and damages our economy in ways that can’t be seen by looking at the surface.
It would be nice if the people in government with the power and the duty to protect the public acknowledged the fact that charging whatever you can get away with is perfectly legal and rational under the “free market” system. Apple and thousands of other businesses do the same. That’s why that system has no place in health care, where people don’t have the option of just deciding not to buy.
Until we address that fundamental fact, all we are doing is moving the deck chairs around on the proverbial Titanic.
Lee Russ