Former House majority leader Dick Armey is guest blogging at Time magazine’s Swampland blog about health care and other issues.
When Armey argued against government subsidies and price regulation, Time’s Jay Carney asked a couple of good questions. Here’s how I would have answered them.
“Would we really be better off if we could shop around for the best price on a quadruple bypass? Or chemotherapy?”
I suggest Carney ask Howard Staab, a 56-year old uninsured contractor in North Carolina who needed a heart valve repaired in 2004. Durham Regional charged $200,000, which Staab couldn’t possibly afford. So he went to India, where a former associate professor of medicine from NYU performed the surgery in a quality hospital for just $10,000. (Mike Tanner and I wrote about Staab and patients with similar stories in our delightful book.)
We don’t need every quadruple bypass candidate to shop around, or to shop internationally, or to shop just on the basis of price. If only a few of them do so — economists call them the “marginal consumers” — we will establish the kind of competition that reduces prices and improves quality even for patients who don’t have the luxury of time.
“Wouldn’t that lead to even greater disparities between the quality of care received by rich and poor?”
Personally, I’m mostly concerned with developing better medical care, and making those innovations available to the poor as quickly as possible. Market competition is the best tool for doing so. Other approaches either stifle innovation or keep prices way too high for the poor to afford.
