Economist Channel

I found a lovely post on health care full of wild ideas at market-ticker.org. You may not agree with all the proposals -- wild even by my standards.  But it is full of interesting detail on what's wrong with the microeconomics of health care delivery, as opposed to the usual focus on health insurance, and who pays, ignoring the vast dysfunction of the underlying market. 

A few choice quotes to whet your appetite

All providers must post, in their offices and on a public web site without any requirement to sign in or otherwise identify oneself to access it, a full and complete price list which shall apply to every person....  

All customers must be billed for actual charges at the same price on a direct basis at the time the service or product is rendered to them.  This immediately and permanently decouples "insurance" from the provision of care.  The current system of an "explanation of benefits" that often features a "negotiated discount" of some 90% is nothing other than an extortion racket and is arguably felonious...  All medical records are the property of, and shall be delivered to, the customer at the time of service in human readable form (a PDF provided on common consumer computer media such as a "flash stick" shall comply with this requirement.)  Any coding or other symbols on said chart must include a key to same in English delivered at the same time....  

All surgical providers of any sort must publish de-identified procedure counts and account for all complications and outcomes, updated no less often than monthly. Consumers must be able to shop not only on price, but also on outcome... 

Auxiliary services (e.g. medical or dental Xrays, lab testing, etc) may not be required to be purchased at the point of use.  If you wish to buy your tests from the lab down the street (which also must post a price) that's up to you.... 

Any test or diagnostic that carries no exposure to drugs or radiation, nor is invasive beyond a blood draw, may be purchased without doctor order or prescription... 

No government funded program or government billed invoice will be paid for medical treatment where a lifestyle change will provide a substantially equivalent or superior benefit that the customer refuses to implement.  The poster child for this is Type II diabetes, where cessation of eating carbohydrates and PUFA oils, with the exception of moderate amounts of whole green vegetables (such as broccoli) will immediately, in nearly all sufferers, return their blood sugar to near normal or normal levels.  The government currently spends about 25% of Medicare and Medicaid dollars on this one condition alone and virtually all of it is spent on people who can make this lifestyle change with that outcome but refuse... 

Health insurance companies must sell true insurance to sell any health-related policy at all.  A true insurance policy is defined as one that (1) does not cover any condition you have received treatment for over the last 24 months...

And so on. For my tastes it suffers from the usual vagueness about the subject of all these sentences. Is transparent pricing, for example, a new set of regulations? Why don't hospitals already post prices, unlike airlines which do so voluntarily? Which regulations are stopping hospitals from competing on price, and maybe we should get rid of those rather than pass new regulations? But apart from the question whether this is new rules or just a vision of how things should be, it's an interesting and refreshing and totally out of the box view.