Ed Cone, a blogger in the Triad, says health care is expensive (in part) because there are too many customers.
900 insurance organizations, the largest of which handles less than 20% of business? That sounds highly inefficient and expensive to me.”
Is Procter & Gamble highly inefficient and their soap expensive because they have thousands of customers, the largest of which handless 15% of its business?
Amazon.com has millions of customers in numerous countries, paying for goods in a number of different ways using different currencies and languages. And yet, Amazon is still the place I go to buy most books. It’s also the place where people go to buy groceries.
The problem with health care is not that there are too many payers. The problem is that there are too few payers and that the payers are not the users. We take out loans for cars, oral surgery, and cars. We pay and get reimbursed for car repairs. But we pay less than one dollar of every seven used at the point of purchase in health care.
(HT: Sam Hieb)
