I had to go to the ER yesterday. I was taken to the closest ER. You bring up geographic monopolies without any irony and yet healthcare has huge and very obvious geographical monopolies.
At the ER I was made to sign something on the way in in a state in which I couldn’t really tell what I was signing. I was given various drugs and sent through a CT scan. I had no idea what was going on. I certainly was in no position, with symptoms of a life threatening condition on top of being incapacitated to say “hey hold up, I think the Safeway has cheaper CT scans can you guys transfer me there!”
Healthcare is entirely different from buying groceries. It does not and will never operate like a typical market for typical commodity items.
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I had to go to the ER yesterday. I was taken to the closest ER. You bring up geographic monopolies without any irony and yet healthcare has huge and very obvious geographical monopolies.
At the ER I was made to sign something on the way in in a state in which I couldn’t really tell what I was signing. I was given various drugs and sent through a CT scan. I had no idea what was going on. I certainly was in no position, with symptoms of a life threatening condition on top of being incapacitated to say “hey hold up, I think the Safeway has cheaper CT scans can you guys transfer me there!”
Healthcare is entirely different from buying groceries. It does not and will never operate like a typical market for typical commodity items.
Emergency medicine is a small fraction of all medicinal needs.
A lot of medicinal procedures allow time for determining what the most cost effective offering is.
But is the ideal system one with several hospitals per city, duplicating expensive resources or one big centre with centralised resources?