Cost of Health Care

Health care costs have tow components, the actual cost and the profits taken.  I include the cost of administering health care in the actual cost because it is probably unavoidable.

Now if you are an insurance provider the rates you provide will include all your projected costs plus desired profit.

You can shuffle that about as to who get to pay how much or if you even provide coverage but the total will be the same unless you reduce demand.

Now you can reduce demand by making use of health care too expensive causing people to forego preventive or needed care.

This is a short term fix, which likely increases future costs as well as leading to worse consequences for the patients.

There is another way to reduce total cost, which would be to reduce the actual cost of treatment or prescriptions.  This of course requires doctors, nurses, and pharmaceutical companies to charge less, which is possible but a hard path.

So any health care plan has to address these issues and realistically no plan can change the dynamic of how cost is generated.

So plans can try to more evenly share the costs between those who can afford it and those who can't and get greater participation, (premiums).

Now if you undo that, you will be faced with the dilemma of people who can't afford need care being forced into bankruptcy or dying when they didn't have to.

This is more of a moral issue than an economic one, but we see it debated as an economic one.

Either you believe everyone should get care, or you don't.

If the first, the only fair way to do that is to do what almost every civilized country in the world has done and go with a single payer system which is government sponsored and financed by taxes.

It has many advantages including cost reduction via profit elimination.

Everything else will be flawed, just how flawed is the only question?