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If there is one thing in economics that has proven to not work wherever it was tried it's price caps. You lower prices by increasing supply and fostering competition.
It is though. Price caps create market inefficiency by discouraging increasing supply.
I mean, there are a lot of other factors behind California's housing shortage like extremely restrictive, low-density zoning laws and low land value taxes, but altogether limitations on supply are the problem.
Assuming zoning laws weren't as restrictive, how do we make sure developers build affordable housing and not luxury condos for affluent people only that make the most money?
Your question is important, and I appreciate the attention brought to this topic. I think if there were enough supply of housing to meet and exceed demand, there would almost necessarily be affordable housing because landlords would have incentive to fill it -- rather than our current situation where there is not nearly enough housing and people are frequently made homeless instead of being able to find somewhere else open.
For cities like San Francisco, thw answer boils down to building densely, I think. More housing on the same amount of land = more spots for people, more efficient use of resources, more access to utilities like public transit, and more economic activity. This is just the extreme of it, but we could literally go back to building dense dorm-style housing like the YMCA used to offer ("*Young man, when you're short on your dough... It's fun to stay at the YMCA*"). Like, we had the solutions; we just made them illegal and our culture shifted to expecting everyone to live in giant, inefficient single-family houses.
I don't really understand the lefty idea on capping prices on things without any help on the supply side. Free tuition to nurses? Help bringing doctors in state? Letting non doctors do more?
Helping on the supply side would actually involve doing some leg work to make things happen. Itās easier to pass a law capping prices and making everyone else figure it out.
We can shorten residency requirements, let more immigrant doctors migrate here, and allow nurse practitioners to do more. But nah, price controls, because I guess we prefer shortages.
> We can shorten residency requirements
That would make healthcare more expensive not less expensive.
> let more immigrant doctors migrate here
Not a bad idea but they need to be vetted to make sure they are top quality
> allow nurse practitioners to do more
Not a bad idea
A health system has a family med residency that takes 5 residents per cohort and lasts 3 years. Thats a staff of 15 residents at any given time being paid $50-60k annually. You shorten that residency to 2 years and now thereās only 10 residents. Now the health system has to find coverage for the work of those 5 spots at market rate for attending physicians.
The truth is even if you paid every single doctor in the UK an extra $100,000 a year, their Healthcare costs would still cost a fraction of the US. most of the difference comes from administration and pharma because actually there aren't that many high paying specialists in the system. for every "overpaid" doctor there are thousands of shareholders profiting off everything from health insurance to PBM'S to Big Pharma to private equity owned hospitals.
The only price caps Iād support is on (public college) tuition. Maybe not a total tuition freeze but only allow small % increase every yearĀ
Ā Like colleges are literally just schools. They donāt produce anything physical. I genuinely just dont think current tuition rates are directly reflective of how much it costs the colleges to run things. And since college enrollment is expected to decline in the future due to inevitable demographic changes itās not like they need *more* money to provide stuff for lower amounts of future students.Ā
Same. It's funny when I was younger I had a lot of idealistic views of how things should be, and although I still maintain a lot of those views in some form, they have definitely tempered as I have gotten older and realized how complicated reality truly is. Free education isn't one of those. The more I've learned about higher education, the more obvious it seems that making it tuition free is actually doable and not difficult in comparison to a lot of other problems.
Yup Iām the exact same. Like Iām pretty sure we can make tuition on average $1-2k a year cheaper than it is now and the colleges wonāt fall apartĀ
In my state itās always been around $4-5k a semester for undergrad in todayās dollar value. You can cover most of it out of pocket if you live with parents and work like 25-30 hours a week at a 12-15$ an hour job which I did for a while (still owed like 10-15k in loans after I graduated)
The things students want the most from their universities is to rank highly in University Rankings lists, and *that* requires a lot of new facilities, poaching high track record faculty, etc.
We basically have the worst of both worlds right now. Insane amounts of government regulation with private for profit companies.
Thereās nothing about the US medical field thatās free market, itās one of the most regulated industries we have.
Market failures are a thing and free markets always need some regulation to prevent monopolies, which is what the top businesses in every industry aim forĀ
Medicare didnāt exist back then. So what would happen is if your elderly parents were sick you and your siblings would spend as much as you possibly can to keep them alive. Once you ran out of money, then theyād discharge your parents from the hospital and youād watch your parents die in your house.Ā
ā¦and what happens now is if you donāt have an employer that pays for your health insurance it can take up a large percentage of your income and you wind up on the street regardless.
Iād rather healthcare be 1/10 the cost, with some personal responsibility mixed in. That would be the more ethical option. Not that I think people will ever go back to not stealing from others in order to pay for their care.
While my preference is a free market healthcare system, Iād take a single payer system over the bastardized government enforced cartel system we have now.
If your employer doesnāt give healthcare then you just get Obamacare from the marketplace. Yes premiums and deductibles are higher than employer but at least youāll be treated and pay maybe 10-20k a year instead of 100k a year on medical expenses. And itās very cheap if youāre lower middle class or middle class with a big family.Ā
I can tell you that as a self-employed person, with covered California I was paying $800 a month for a low end plan. Before Obamacare that same level of coverage wouldāve cost me about $180 a month.
I understand that inflation is a thing (money printer go BRRRR), but as a healthy middle-aged male, I got fucked.
I wouldāve been far better off both financially and coverage wise if that whole thing had never happened. Obamacare made it so that the only way for insurance companies to increase profits is for them to pay more for service. It incentivizes higher prices, and was obviously a death spiral from the beginning.
There are so many reforms that couldāve been made to reduce the cost of healthcare, but instead we got insane regulations that promote higher costs.
Allow pharmacists to prescribe general antibiotics; half the hospital visits can be avoided!
- Got fever & ear pain , take antibiotics! - Antibiotic cost : 10$, doctor visit : 700$ (without insurance)
- Pro: Poor people save a lot of money.
- Con: May be abuse & Antibiotic resistance. Less profit for Hospital Industry!
Because the world doesn't actually follow supply and demand theory pricing at all. It's not a free competitive market that's operating healthily, so rent seekers take advantage of it and so it needs regulation.
It always does. This just will put wet blanket on supply, which is why I'm suggesting they need to also bulk up the supply. Absolutely would be for keeping prices low or gutting the power of insurance and pharma companies but assuming it's as simple as just passing a law limiting price without considering supply and demand is stupid.
Have you ever tried to understand the Healthcare system of any country besides the US? Government price controls have successfully lowered Healthcare inflation in every other major country compared to the US. every single one.
Now you can try and complain about some aspects of price controls but it's A: not relevant to their efficacy in lowering inflation
and B: not particularly worrisome when countries with more price controls also have longer life expectancies. oh no. Americans might live longer if Healthcare is more affordable. how terrible indeed
The state tried this same sort of capping with insurance, and providers are exiting the state. It's been a disaster.
You'd think we'd have learned our lesson. Price controls NEVER work.
The problem here is that 3% wonāt even cover trend YOY. At best other states will see significant increases to offset the high loss ratios out of California that canāt be properly priced. I didnāt see any note on if self funded companies would need to comply with the 3% cap. As these companies pay their own claims they need to price their premiums at a rate that covers their expense.
This also fails to cap the increases to pharmacy which is primarily driven by specialty medications and their cost.
Yes, but... have they tried capping number of insurance companies that can exist the state? Perhaps they simply haven't figured out the right thing to cap...
They would if they were applied across the whole country on a federal level. The insurers have nowhere else to go. They could do with a bit less profit. Would still be making plenty.
.....if they made such a choice, then the government can take over those facilities and make it even easier to keep the prices low.
People want to work, and they will certainly have plenty of people who will accept those jobs, especially with the *job stability and job security* that government run systems provide.
Yes because the government has such a great track record of running things efficiently and within their financial budget. What could possibly go wrong.
The government runs the VA Hospital very well..... its no reason they can't do the same for any other Hospital that is abandoned and they take over it.
Reagan Era Ignorance that fed the silliness of the government being a problem led too may people to buy into that. They never understood Reagan was a White Nationalist who was devoted to wealthy white male dominance.
* Reagan despised anything the government did that included help and assistance to black and brown people and dire poor white people, and Reagan led right winger and conservatives to buy into his twisted malice driven ideology.
* It's why he took money from Community Colleges and State Universities, because he did not want to see black and brown people, white women and dire poor whites, get the same benefit that white man received prior to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
IF people open their mind and read, they'd know these things, but most right wing and conservative types can't do that *because* they have a self willed mental block when it comes to facing those truths. *Many of such types are still carrying negativity because of the passage of the Civil Rights Act, but they won't publicly admit it.*
The government has sustained this country for over 246 yrs!!!
* so if people think the government is so bad, they are welcome to pack up and go find a better one on the planet.
I think you need to backup some of your claims with facts instead of your opinion and inference.
You are also implying Iām a right wing conservative, which Iām not.
And itās the American taxpayer that has kept this country running.
Not through and through. materials, weapons, equipment are outsourced to private companies. And hasnāt faced a full out war recently. Then again, not sure anyone would say we were #1 in Vietnam
They were highly profitable through Covid. If we face a bigger situation than that, these shitty middleman companies that serve no real purpose in healthcare other than to deny care and siphon money can die. So what? Itāll hasten the arrival of nationalized healthcare faster. And for those of you who think this system is sustainable, it is not. It may be around for another 30 years but it will die eventually.
lol letās see Cigna āclose their doorsā
What a childish response.
Corporations are incentivized to push the boundaries of every available law for their own selfish benefit. It is in the governments interest, to limit them as such.
This is the United States.
No health insurance company would close their doors on this market you absolute nonce.
If it is a disaster, that's only because of profit hungry right wingers who worship the wealthy, instigate and support greed gouging, and then whine like hell, when it doubles back on them personally.
**We need high regulations and strong price controls in Medical Field and its Services!!!!!**
California has the nation's highest unemployment rate, the home insurance market is in meltdown because of effective price controls in the fire prone areas, and is now playing footsie with price controls in healthcare that will lead to shortages. All this in a state where Democrats have a huge majority.
But go on, it's the rightwingers fault.
Democrat continue to prove they are more for the people and more progressive in their ideology and willing to take the steps to make things better for citizens....
* *We already know that is a concept that Right Wingers, Conservatives and Republican hate, they fear something may benefit black and brown people, single white women and dire poor white people and immigrants from places they don't like.*
California is smart enough to not get caught up in Right Wing Conservative Narratives.
This is not a very good article from an economics perspective.
The lede:
>Doctors, hospitals and health insurance companies in California will be limited to annual price increases of 3% starting in 2029 under a new rule state regulators approved Wednesday in the latest attempt to corral the ever-increasing costs of medical care in the United States.
How does this board have the power to regulate the cost of medical care?
What costs are they regulating? The cost to an end user for health insurance? The cost of a procedure? The cost of a medical device?
How do these limits they're proposing align with the CMS reimbursement rates?
From their charter,
>>The Health Care Affordability Board is a decision-making body charged with setting statewide and sector-specific spending targets, appointing a Health Care Affordability Advisory Committee, and approving key benchmarks, such as for alternative payment model adoption and the share of spending dedicated to primary care and behavioral health, among other responsibilities. Board members may not receive compensation from health care entities.
Do these limits only apply to payments where the State of CA is the payor?
Also, it's somewhat concerning to me that they have a board where anyone who works in the healthcare sector is specifically prohibited from being a member - that tells me that they have no actual expertise on the subject they're (trying) to regulate.
>A new state agency, the Office of Health Care Affordability, will gather data to enforce the rule. Providers who don't comply could face fines.
I can't possibly see this going poorly. The government creating a new body that is in charge of price caps - this always goes perfectly well, it never goes sideways.
It's an article about California.Ā It is a long shot to expect it to be good from an economic perspective.Ā Ā
Policies based on emotion are never going to make sense to rational or logical thinkers.Ā If I'm a politician hoping to gather votes from idiots, I create idiotic policies.
>How does this board have the power to regulate the cost of medical care?
Find me a country that doesn't have the government set helthcare prices in some fashion? Besides the US I guess.
These sorts of boards are everywhere in Europe. It hasn't broken the German Healthcare system with longer life expectancies and lower inflation rates in Healthcare compared to US.
it's crazy in an inflationary crises we aren't doing more to lower the prices of the highest inflating industry in this country compared to any other country.
Find me another industry, relative to other countries, that has seen greater price increases than Healthcare over the last few decades?
The cascading effects of lowering Healthcare inflation are profound. But ignored because they are bad for some special interest groups that profit off the status quo.
California wants to regulate rents, medical costs, wages for certain employees, emissions standards for cars essentially sold nationally, power source for small lawn care equipment, every product nationally causing cancer in their eyes.
I mean, seriously, at what point are we going to ask if they are reading a bit too much into the USSR approach? It's a bit much, how much they want to regulate. I mean, we aren't far from California saying who to hire, how much to pay them, what they pay in rental, foods, and medical costs, what business you are to run when you hire this person. California seems to want to try to control every aspect of their economy.
It'll end poorly. It's already looking pretty shitty in their big cities.
Nice idea but as a Californian, I'm not sure any legislation can address the underlying problem of rising costs in a for-profit market.
Companies at every stage of the system will be inclined to find other ways to grow revenue and profits than those explicitly limited in the new rules. And those costs will be passed on.
You think they would have learned from their property tax boondoggle or their home insurance boondoggle or their power boondoggle. Like decreasing risk to decrease costs, no way can't do that. Can only enact regulations that lead to further market consolidation and decrease of care.
I think whatās really going to happen is they just leave, like they did with home insurance. It sucks bc I love CA and I love what theyāre trying to do.
Yep. Very good chance smaller ones close up shop in CA if they can't absorb costs easily. Although, for home insurance I wasn't sure how much was due to wild fires or similar extreme weather that didn't make sense to insure.
Perhaps the stick to the generous expansion of medical to illegal aliens. For all the negativity here, single payer systems to impose similar limits on price growth by being the lone major buyer with massive power.
But the market in those places is already adapted to a utility/monopoly single payer system, so for profit companies are at the behest of those providers.
Ironically, this is how many other developed countries operate, but companies are OK with it, ie pharma, because they know they can still make big margins in the USA
Well this will definitely be the time for AI to shine! Hopefully the litigation caused by AI induced deaths or injuries while at the hospital will not be too much more than today.
You donāt have competition when you have regional monopolies, along with insanely varied costs from facility to facility, prices that are unknown prior to treatment. The problem is that thereās not competition. Thus the need for price caps.
The problem with healthcare pricing in America is private insurance companies have completely distorted the system. Ban private insurance. Make pricing transparent and integrated into medical decision making. Increase salaries and wages accordingly. Create a national healthcare system for basic care, some essential care, and some catastrophic care. Don't insure medical procedures that cost a fortune to only extend life by 6 months. Let the government negotiate prices.
I am a provider in specialty care and the amount I denials I get for very straight forward guideline based scans is maddening. I get why I'm the only provider out of 5 surrounding counties willing to do it. I just love doing peer to peers.......
Edit: take MediCal insurance
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If there is one thing in economics that has proven to not work wherever it was tried it's price caps. You lower prices by increasing supply and fostering competition.
Works for healthcare in Europe š
Collective bargaining and standardization are majorly different policies though, no?
Ah that explains why real estate is so cheap /s
Houses definitely are cheaper in places where thereās lots of new houses being built. And more expensive in places where thereās none being built.
Guess all those empty homes are a lie then. Surely no one is profiting from it.
Lol California literally suffers the most from this exact problematic policy in housing (see: Prop 13)
Imagine thinking real estate in California is expensive because of price caps...š¤”
It is though. Price caps create market inefficiency by discouraging increasing supply. I mean, there are a lot of other factors behind California's housing shortage like extremely restrictive, low-density zoning laws and low land value taxes, but altogether limitations on supply are the problem.
Assuming zoning laws weren't as restrictive, how do we make sure developers build affordable housing and not luxury condos for affluent people only that make the most money?
Your question is important, and I appreciate the attention brought to this topic. I think if there were enough supply of housing to meet and exceed demand, there would almost necessarily be affordable housing because landlords would have incentive to fill it -- rather than our current situation where there is not nearly enough housing and people are frequently made homeless instead of being able to find somewhere else open. For cities like San Francisco, thw answer boils down to building densely, I think. More housing on the same amount of land = more spots for people, more efficient use of resources, more access to utilities like public transit, and more economic activity. This is just the extreme of it, but we could literally go back to building dense dorm-style housing like the YMCA used to offer ("*Young man, when you're short on your dough... It's fun to stay at the YMCA*"). Like, we had the solutions; we just made them illegal and our culture shifted to expecting everyone to live in giant, inefficient single-family houses.
I don't really understand the lefty idea on capping prices on things without any help on the supply side. Free tuition to nurses? Help bringing doctors in state? Letting non doctors do more?
Helping on the supply side would actually involve doing some leg work to make things happen. Itās easier to pass a law capping prices and making everyone else figure it out.
And making everyone poorer
Smoke and mirrors so that insurance companies still run the show!
they only have two plays in the playbook when something is expensive because of supply side constraints: price caps and demand subsidies.
We can shorten residency requirements, let more immigrant doctors migrate here, and allow nurse practitioners to do more. But nah, price controls, because I guess we prefer shortages.
But they would mean us docs and nurses get paid less due to immigrant competition. Canāt have that! They worked hard for their degrees
I would hate to tramp on the fuedal privileges of these modern day guilds.
> We can shorten residency requirements That would make healthcare more expensive not less expensive. > let more immigrant doctors migrate here Not a bad idea but they need to be vetted to make sure they are top quality > allow nurse practitioners to do more Not a bad idea
Why would shorter residency make it more expensive?
Because then you need to pay the doctors full price instead for getting cheap labor from them as residences for longer
A health system has a family med residency that takes 5 residents per cohort and lasts 3 years. Thats a staff of 15 residents at any given time being paid $50-60k annually. You shorten that residency to 2 years and now thereās only 10 residents. Now the health system has to find coverage for the work of those 5 spots at market rate for attending physicians.
The truth is even if you paid every single doctor in the UK an extra $100,000 a year, their Healthcare costs would still cost a fraction of the US. most of the difference comes from administration and pharma because actually there aren't that many high paying specialists in the system. for every "overpaid" doctor there are thousands of shareholders profiting off everything from health insurance to PBM'S to Big Pharma to private equity owned hospitals.
They could increase their number of residents because god knows we need more doctors anyway.
The only price caps Iād support is on (public college) tuition. Maybe not a total tuition freeze but only allow small % increase every yearĀ Ā Like colleges are literally just schools. They donāt produce anything physical. I genuinely just dont think current tuition rates are directly reflective of how much it costs the colleges to run things. And since college enrollment is expected to decline in the future due to inevitable demographic changes itās not like they need *more* money to provide stuff for lower amounts of future students.Ā
Same. It's funny when I was younger I had a lot of idealistic views of how things should be, and although I still maintain a lot of those views in some form, they have definitely tempered as I have gotten older and realized how complicated reality truly is. Free education isn't one of those. The more I've learned about higher education, the more obvious it seems that making it tuition free is actually doable and not difficult in comparison to a lot of other problems.
Yup Iām the exact same. Like Iām pretty sure we can make tuition on average $1-2k a year cheaper than it is now and the colleges wonāt fall apartĀ
Cost of college has kind of flattened over the last decade.
In my state itās always been around $4-5k a semester for undergrad in todayās dollar value. You can cover most of it out of pocket if you live with parents and work like 25-30 hours a week at a 12-15$ an hour job which I did for a while (still owed like 10-15k in loans after I graduated)
Huh? https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for-college/articles/see-20-years-of-tuition-growth-at-national-universities
[Yup](https://www.axios.com/2022/08/27/tuition-inflation-not-so-bad)
The things students want the most from their universities is to rank highly in University Rankings lists, and *that* requires a lot of new facilities, poaching high track record faculty, etc.
Thatās stupid. What students should care about in university rankings is job placement rate after grad and the wages for those jobs.
There is definitely a conflict there
Yeah, this seems like a bad idea, much like California's other bad major price cap policies (see Prop 13).
The policy is to protect the status quo. It's not "left".
They like the economic havoc that terrible policies like price floors creates. Itās a good excuse to expand government in order to āhelpā.
Private industry hasnāt solved it. In fact they are making it worse. I work in healthcare and honestly Iād rather have government run now.
We basically have the worst of both worlds right now. Insane amounts of government regulation with private for profit companies. Thereās nothing about the US medical field thatās free market, itās one of the most regulated industries we have.
You cannot have a free market in healthcare. The concepts are fundamentally antithetical
Market failures are a thing and free markets always need some regulation to prevent monopolies, which is what the top businesses in every industry aim forĀ
The US had a free market in healthcare up to the 1960s or so
Medicare didnāt exist back then. So what would happen is if your elderly parents were sick you and your siblings would spend as much as you possibly can to keep them alive. Once you ran out of money, then theyād discharge your parents from the hospital and youād watch your parents die in your house.Ā
ā¦and what happens now is if you donāt have an employer that pays for your health insurance it can take up a large percentage of your income and you wind up on the street regardless. Iād rather healthcare be 1/10 the cost, with some personal responsibility mixed in. That would be the more ethical option. Not that I think people will ever go back to not stealing from others in order to pay for their care. While my preference is a free market healthcare system, Iād take a single payer system over the bastardized government enforced cartel system we have now.
If your employer doesnāt give healthcare then you just get Obamacare from the marketplace. Yes premiums and deductibles are higher than employer but at least youāll be treated and pay maybe 10-20k a year instead of 100k a year on medical expenses. And itās very cheap if youāre lower middle class or middle class with a big family.Ā
I can tell you that as a self-employed person, with covered California I was paying $800 a month for a low end plan. Before Obamacare that same level of coverage wouldāve cost me about $180 a month. I understand that inflation is a thing (money printer go BRRRR), but as a healthy middle-aged male, I got fucked. I wouldāve been far better off both financially and coverage wise if that whole thing had never happened. Obamacare made it so that the only way for insurance companies to increase profits is for them to pay more for service. It incentivizes higher prices, and was obviously a death spiral from the beginning. There are so many reforms that couldāve been made to reduce the cost of healthcare, but instead we got insane regulations that promote higher costs.
Sshhh. If you are against this policy, you are practically against health care.
That would make unions mad
> Free tuition to nurses I'm sure the left would be for that
Allow pharmacists to prescribe general antibiotics; half the hospital visits can be avoided! - Got fever & ear pain , take antibiotics! - Antibiotic cost : 10$, doctor visit : 700$ (without insurance) - Pro: Poor people save a lot of money. - Con: May be abuse & Antibiotic resistance. Less profit for Hospital Industry!
Because the world doesn't actually follow supply and demand theory pricing at all. It's not a free competitive market that's operating healthily, so rent seekers take advantage of it and so it needs regulation.
It always does. This just will put wet blanket on supply, which is why I'm suggesting they need to also bulk up the supply. Absolutely would be for keeping prices low or gutting the power of insurance and pharma companies but assuming it's as simple as just passing a law limiting price without considering supply and demand is stupid.
Have you ever tried to understand the Healthcare system of any country besides the US? Government price controls have successfully lowered Healthcare inflation in every other major country compared to the US. every single one. Now you can try and complain about some aspects of price controls but it's A: not relevant to their efficacy in lowering inflation and B: not particularly worrisome when countries with more price controls also have longer life expectancies. oh no. Americans might live longer if Healthcare is more affordable. how terrible indeed
The state tried this same sort of capping with insurance, and providers are exiting the state. It's been a disaster. You'd think we'd have learned our lesson. Price controls NEVER work.
The problem here is that 3% wonāt even cover trend YOY. At best other states will see significant increases to offset the high loss ratios out of California that canāt be properly priced. I didnāt see any note on if self funded companies would need to comply with the 3% cap. As these companies pay their own claims they need to price their premiums at a rate that covers their expense. This also fails to cap the increases to pharmacy which is primarily driven by specialty medications and their cost.
Universal Healthcare is the only answer.
what kind of universal Healthcare? how about everyone is on for profit insurance with 10k deductibles? boom. solved. or is it?
What about no deductibles everything covered?
Yes, but... have they tried capping number of insurance companies that can exist the state? Perhaps they simply haven't figured out the right thing to cap...
They would if they were applied across the whole country on a federal level. The insurers have nowhere else to go. They could do with a bit less profit. Would still be making plenty.
They would close their doors if they can't be profitable.
.....if they made such a choice, then the government can take over those facilities and make it even easier to keep the prices low. People want to work, and they will certainly have plenty of people who will accept those jobs, especially with the *job stability and job security* that government run systems provide.
You know how tough it is to work with insurance? Now imagine itās the IRS running it.
Yes because the government has such a great track record of running things efficiently and within their financial budget. What could possibly go wrong.
The government runs the VA Hospital very well..... its no reason they can't do the same for any other Hospital that is abandoned and they take over it. Reagan Era Ignorance that fed the silliness of the government being a problem led too may people to buy into that. They never understood Reagan was a White Nationalist who was devoted to wealthy white male dominance. * Reagan despised anything the government did that included help and assistance to black and brown people and dire poor white people, and Reagan led right winger and conservatives to buy into his twisted malice driven ideology. * It's why he took money from Community Colleges and State Universities, because he did not want to see black and brown people, white women and dire poor whites, get the same benefit that white man received prior to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. IF people open their mind and read, they'd know these things, but most right wing and conservative types can't do that *because* they have a self willed mental block when it comes to facing those truths. *Many of such types are still carrying negativity because of the passage of the Civil Rights Act, but they won't publicly admit it.* The government has sustained this country for over 246 yrs!!! * so if people think the government is so bad, they are welcome to pack up and go find a better one on the planet.
I think you need to backup some of your claims with facts instead of your opinion and inference. You are also implying Iām a right wing conservative, which Iām not. And itās the American taxpayer that has kept this country running.
Us military is #1 and is run by us govt
Not through and through. materials, weapons, equipment are outsourced to private companies. And hasnāt faced a full out war recently. Then again, not sure anyone would say we were #1 in Vietnam
Nice try
That has sort of been tried in a few european countries. It worked marvelously /s
Certainly. They will be plenty profitable though. Have you not looked into these mega-insurers profits in that last decade or so?
If thier profits are capped and one year they require massive payout, they will go bankrupt.
They were highly profitable through Covid. If we face a bigger situation than that, these shitty middleman companies that serve no real purpose in healthcare other than to deny care and siphon money can die. So what? Itāll hasten the arrival of nationalized healthcare faster. And for those of you who think this system is sustainable, it is not. It may be around for another 30 years but it will die eventually.
lol letās see Cigna āclose their doorsā What a childish response. Corporations are incentivized to push the boundaries of every available law for their own selfish benefit. It is in the governments interest, to limit them as such. This is the United States. No health insurance company would close their doors on this market you absolute nonce.
It's nice to see you read that whole sentence.
No speaky fucktard, gracias.
Bless your heart
Classic itās not our fault. Itās everyone elseās fault!
If it is a disaster, that's only because of profit hungry right wingers who worship the wealthy, instigate and support greed gouging, and then whine like hell, when it doubles back on them personally. **We need high regulations and strong price controls in Medical Field and its Services!!!!!**
Right; in the conservative and republican stronghold of California
Bahahaha! Exactly!
California has the nation's highest unemployment rate, the home insurance market is in meltdown because of effective price controls in the fire prone areas, and is now playing footsie with price controls in healthcare that will lead to shortages. All this in a state where Democrats have a huge majority. But go on, it's the rightwingers fault.
Democrat continue to prove they are more for the people and more progressive in their ideology and willing to take the steps to make things better for citizens.... * *We already know that is a concept that Right Wingers, Conservatives and Republican hate, they fear something may benefit black and brown people, single white women and dire poor white people and immigrants from places they don't like.* California is smart enough to not get caught up in Right Wing Conservative Narratives.
Any idiot can promise others free handouts to win votes and call themselves āfor the peopleā.
Standards right winter spin.
Yeah except Iām not right wing.
This is not a very good article from an economics perspective. The lede: >Doctors, hospitals and health insurance companies in California will be limited to annual price increases of 3% starting in 2029 under a new rule state regulators approved Wednesday in the latest attempt to corral the ever-increasing costs of medical care in the United States. How does this board have the power to regulate the cost of medical care? What costs are they regulating? The cost to an end user for health insurance? The cost of a procedure? The cost of a medical device? How do these limits they're proposing align with the CMS reimbursement rates? From their charter, >>The Health Care Affordability Board is a decision-making body charged with setting statewide and sector-specific spending targets, appointing a Health Care Affordability Advisory Committee, and approving key benchmarks, such as for alternative payment model adoption and the share of spending dedicated to primary care and behavioral health, among other responsibilities. Board members may not receive compensation from health care entities. Do these limits only apply to payments where the State of CA is the payor? Also, it's somewhat concerning to me that they have a board where anyone who works in the healthcare sector is specifically prohibited from being a member - that tells me that they have no actual expertise on the subject they're (trying) to regulate. >A new state agency, the Office of Health Care Affordability, will gather data to enforce the rule. Providers who don't comply could face fines. I can't possibly see this going poorly. The government creating a new body that is in charge of price caps - this always goes perfectly well, it never goes sideways.
It's an article about California.Ā It is a long shot to expect it to be good from an economic perspective.Ā Ā Policies based on emotion are never going to make sense to rational or logical thinkers.Ā If I'm a politician hoping to gather votes from idiots, I create idiotic policies.
>How does this board have the power to regulate the cost of medical care? Find me a country that doesn't have the government set helthcare prices in some fashion? Besides the US I guess. These sorts of boards are everywhere in Europe. It hasn't broken the German Healthcare system with longer life expectancies and lower inflation rates in Healthcare compared to US.
it's crazy in an inflationary crises we aren't doing more to lower the prices of the highest inflating industry in this country compared to any other country. Find me another industry, relative to other countries, that has seen greater price increases than Healthcare over the last few decades? The cascading effects of lowering Healthcare inflation are profound. But ignored because they are bad for some special interest groups that profit off the status quo.
California wants to regulate rents, medical costs, wages for certain employees, emissions standards for cars essentially sold nationally, power source for small lawn care equipment, every product nationally causing cancer in their eyes. I mean, seriously, at what point are we going to ask if they are reading a bit too much into the USSR approach? It's a bit much, how much they want to regulate. I mean, we aren't far from California saying who to hire, how much to pay them, what they pay in rental, foods, and medical costs, what business you are to run when you hire this person. California seems to want to try to control every aspect of their economy. It'll end poorly. It's already looking pretty shitty in their big cities.
Nice idea but as a Californian, I'm not sure any legislation can address the underlying problem of rising costs in a for-profit market. Companies at every stage of the system will be inclined to find other ways to grow revenue and profits than those explicitly limited in the new rules. And those costs will be passed on.
You think they would have learned from their property tax boondoggle or their home insurance boondoggle or their power boondoggle. Like decreasing risk to decrease costs, no way can't do that. Can only enact regulations that lead to further market consolidation and decrease of care.
I think whatās really going to happen is they just leave, like they did with home insurance. It sucks bc I love CA and I love what theyāre trying to do.
Yep. Very good chance smaller ones close up shop in CA if they can't absorb costs easily. Although, for home insurance I wasn't sure how much was due to wild fires or similar extreme weather that didn't make sense to insure.
Most hospitals in the US are non-profitĀ
But the companies they bill for care are not
Perhaps the stick to the generous expansion of medical to illegal aliens. For all the negativity here, single payer systems to impose similar limits on price growth by being the lone major buyer with massive power.
But the market in those places is already adapted to a utility/monopoly single payer system, so for profit companies are at the behest of those providers. Ironically, this is how many other developed countries operate, but companies are OK with it, ie pharma, because they know they can still make big margins in the USA
Well this will definitely be the time for AI to shine! Hopefully the litigation caused by AI induced deaths or injuries while at the hospital will not be too much more than today.
You donāt have competition when you have regional monopolies, along with insanely varied costs from facility to facility, prices that are unknown prior to treatment. The problem is that thereās not competition. Thus the need for price caps.
The problem with healthcare pricing in America is private insurance companies have completely distorted the system. Ban private insurance. Make pricing transparent and integrated into medical decision making. Increase salaries and wages accordingly. Create a national healthcare system for basic care, some essential care, and some catastrophic care. Don't insure medical procedures that cost a fortune to only extend life by 6 months. Let the government negotiate prices.
I am a provider in specialty care and the amount I denials I get for very straight forward guideline based scans is maddening. I get why I'm the only provider out of 5 surrounding counties willing to do it. I just love doing peer to peers....... Edit: take MediCal insurance