Let me start up front and note that this is not the case in every facet, especially on the cutting edge of medicine. Where new technologies, innovations, and experimental treatments are taking place, we often don’t have the safety data to make them widely available to humanity in the healthcare industries. We often take more risks with livestock or our pets than we would be willing to take with our children or our loved ones.
That is entirely understandable and nothing in this post should be construed incorrectly to say that human lives are not valuable.
Perfect comparisons between the two are also incredibly difficult. Veterinarians are not completely free market, as they still have licensing fees, board certifications, and require additional permits and licenses for specific procedures. Some of those allow them to have narcotics or sedatives on hand for surgical procedures or other various uses. All of those things, however, that have equivalency between humans and animals are far more expensive when treating our own species.
This is not a function of the market.
We can start from the initial aspects of routine care. Wellness checks and routine visits, or other elective procedures, are required by law to be covered by insurance plans. With most people now opting to utilize their insurance to save their own out-of-pocket expense, a third party insurance company influences the prices of medical services. Many in our population now have such insurance plans due to the additional requirement for most businesses to offer those healthcare plans to their employees.
The effect is that medical facilities have to have a staff to process insurance claims, which makes the facility costs slightly more expensive. Other relationships and network deals from insurance companies place administrative requirements that either take more of a physician’s time to appeal the requirement of an unnecessary procedure, lab, or radiological survey, or those things are ordered unnecessarily because the cost to the patient is nil. The result is bloat in terms of care, and a rise in prices across the board for medicine.
Further exacerbating this, in a normal relationship between a provider and a patient, you would expect the conversation regarding healthcare decisions to be able to focus on the needs of the patient, the risks or benefits of a procedure or lab, and then discuss the costs. The costs of a test or procedure are critical to the decision-making process in any service or product industry, but with insurance so heavily involved, the price mechanism in our healthcare is absolutely screwed up.
Contrast that with your pet’s healthcare.
Over the phone, you can contact a veterinarian clinic and discuss what you think you need for your pet. Tell them you are looking to get a wellness visit, and they can almost always tell you the cost for the visit. If during the visit, you were to ask how much a prescription or a vaccine will cost, they can tell you right away. If there is an emergency, they will work to stabilize your pet and then they will present options for you and recommendations regarding the considered procedures. Again, if you want to know the cost, they can tell you.
At each point in the process, a half-decent veterinarian clinic can tell you the costs of what you are seeking and allow you to determine if that would be an expense worth spending on.
There are also options in animal healthcare that government regulatory measures have removed from the care of human patients. End-of-life decisions are often left in the hands of elected bureaucrats and providers are not licensed to discuss these options with their patients. Red tape forges an obstacle-laden path which patients are far too often ill-equipped to navigate.
As a medical professional myself, I find healthcare too difficult to navigate. Referrals go off into some netherworld and patients call to check their status when they haven’t received calls, leaving me with very few answers. When I have the fortune of knowing the individual I am referring them to, I can often close that communication loop, but even then, both the provider receiving the referral and the referring provider are at the whims of the referral system. A bureaucratic nightmare if there ever was one.
The beauty of the veterinary system is that most of the decisions are adequately made at the level they need to be made. The customer and the provider talk about options, recommendations are made, prices are discussed, and the decisions are executed.
Some may resist the analogy on the pretense that the customer in a veterinary clinic is the pet owner, and therefore, not the patient. That is true. The issue is that the arguments I have expressed here are only more important, not less, when making decisions for ourselves. Since the animals are incapable of paying for their own care, and in the absence of any care the decisions would be left up to nature, essentially guaranteeing death or handicap for life, the individual making the payment gets to determine the fate.
In a world where insurance companies and government enforce bureaucracies are the ones making the decisions, you are left with only emotional appeals to the system in the hopes that they will determine your are worth the effort, or to appeal their decision to limit alternative options for care. Fortunately for many patients, they have decided everyone is worth it. If patients had to cover the costs themselves, however, they might not determine it is worthwhile themselves. The decision should be left to the patient, and they can’t make an accurate decision without adequate information.
We already have patients looking at non-financial costs to make a healthcare decision. Those with terminal diagnoses often opt-out of therapy in order to avoid prolonging their own agony, or that of their families, for a few more days, weeks, or months.
Without the collective requirement placed on future generations, would someone opt for that same therapy if it might bankrupt their children, grandchildren, or great-grandchildren? That is the ultimate effect of removing cost from decision-making process, but since it is spread among the future progeny of strangers, we continue seeking unnecessary care that we might otherwise avoid.
Ignore those effects of government regulations at your own peril.
I have written a little about Direct Primary Care or Concierge Care alternatives that have sought to redefine medical care to avoid the insurance obstacle course, and there are also healthcare coops or cost-sharing communities that offer alternatives to the modern insurance quagmire for those emergencies or unplanned expenses. So the free market is offering alternatives that will improve medical care, but insurance companies still enjoy a monopoly on government-approved and mandated plans from employers, which for many, will leave them trapped inside of an inefficient system missing the most important aspect of any industry.
Customer choice.
Darker still is this continued mislabeling of the system as free-market. A true free market would offer prices to patients to aid in their decision-making. It would offer all individuals the option of wanting to be insured or not, and provide countless options and varieties of plans for those who wanted to have insurance. Employers wouldn’t be required to purchase plans at all, and they would be able to fund other options, like cost-sharing or direct primary care models, or employees could completely opt-out and instead ask for higher wages.
Perspective is gained through a deliberate effort to analyze our world. It takes challenging our own biases and often being willing to admit what we don’t know. There are a lot of specific situations in which very well-intentioned people have rationalized advocating for the government measures that exist. The ability to develop a scenario where someone gains from the current system is not a complete and comprehensive analysis of the problem, though. Someone always has to pay the costs, and in healthcare, you are either paying higher costs for care, or someone else is paying the costs in lower wages.
We ignore that to our own peril. This way of thinking and being willing to challenge the narrative we are indoctrinated into is not offered to us in our public educations. Again, a highly regulated and centralized system rife with many of the same problems. The information is available, though, with some effort. If you want to challenge many of the things you were taught, you can start today by learning the history they didn’t teach you. Join Liberty Classroom.
Join the Other Hands to like, share, and discuss. Subscribe below so you don’t miss any new posts and please share with friends and family! Even if only to have experts come correct me and tell me how wrong I am, the world doesn’t improve by avoiding discourse.
