MCViewPoint

https://mises.org/wire/do-we-have-free-market-medical-system

…Here is how it actually works:

1. Most people wonder why there are no visible prices in medicine. You only find out what the charge has been after the service has been delivered. There actually are prices — controlled prices — but you aren’t supposed to know what they are. Each year a committee of the American Medical Association recommends a set of prices to Medicare. The committee is dominated by medical specialists, so specialists tend to do particularly well. Medicare is actually run, not by government, but by private insurance companies, and these companies adopt these prices for private insurance purposes as well. Congress further sweetened this price controlled system for hospitals by requiring Medicare to pay more for the same service if provided by hospital employees. This has inevitably led to local hospitals buying out most of the surrounding private medical practices, which has in turn created local medical service monopolies that feed patients to the hospital for its more costly services.

2. These monopolies are further sweetened for doctors by legally barring nurses, chiropractors, four-year trained naturopathic doctors, and other health professionals from using the full extent of their medical training. In this way, the supply of medical services is constrained, which further raises prices.

3. Notwithstanding all the preceding, it is not the American Medical Association, which is itself financed by a monopoly in medical coding granted by the US government department of Health and Human Services, nor the hospitals, nor the medical doctors as a group that actually run the medical system. The top spot is reserved for the drug companies, which in turn share their largesse with the AMA, doctors, medical journals, media companies, and especially with politicians. In return, drug companies are granted a series of powerful monopolies, monopolies that drive up the cost of medicine and, given the employer role in healthcare, destroy jobs, raises, and economic opportunity as well…

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