{"id":2734,"date":"2010-08-05T21:06:21","date_gmt":"2010-08-05T21:06:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=2734"},"modified":"2010-08-05T21:06:21","modified_gmt":"2010-08-05T21:06:21","slug":"market_failure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=2734","title":{"rendered":"Market Failure"},"content":{"rendered":"

A quick look at my health insurance claims revealed that the combined cost of my brief ER\/ICU visit was almost $12,000. I have no idea whether this is competitively priced in comparison to other hospitals, but it doesn’t really matter. I wasn’t in any condition to shop around for the best deal. But I’ve had cost containment on the brain after attending a health reform conference for the last couple days and listening to a very smart MIT economist talk about the the issue. As illustrated in my own case, free market principles don’t work very well when it comes to health care. I didn’t have the luxury of time to compare prices for an ICU stay and even if I did, I would have no idea what a fair price would be. More importantly, I’m shielded from price considerations because every hospital has already struck a side deal with my insurer.<\/p>\n

The Affordable Care Act contains several provisions to encourage bundling of services and paying for effective treatments, but it’s going to take a lot more work to arrive at a day when health care services are reasonably and transparently priced. <\/p>\n

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A quick look at my health insurance claims revealed that the combined cost of my brief ER\/ICU visit was almost $12,000. I have no idea whether this is competitively priced in comparison to other hospitals, but it doesn’t really matter. I wasn’t in any condition to shop around for the best deal. But I’ve had […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-1-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9Iwau-I6","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2734","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2734"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2734\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}