Last Friday night, I watched 20/20 on ABC. The program was an hour-long special by John Stossel on what is wrong with the American health care system. His view was not that the problems were related to the fact that there are millions of people without health insurance, but rather, that our problems stem from the fact that so many people DO have health insurance.

Surprisingly, a lot of what he presented in his program mirrored a lot of the thoughts I have posted in previous blog articles:

Doctors Should Give a Satisfaction Guarantee
What Happened To Competition?

In my blog posts, I complained about how nobody shops around for health care services. We simply do what the doctors tell us regardless of cost. Most of the time, the doctors don't even give you an idea of what the cost of a procedure might be. Stossel said the same. He said that people with insurance are more likely to have procedures/tests done without thinking about costs because "insurance will pay for it". And when customers don't care about costs, prices go up. Why? Because they can. Health care providers are in business to make money and anyone who thinks they are just good Samaritans is completely wrong.

My posts had suggestions of have a "menu" of prices for different procedures and tests. According to Stossel's report, some private clinics already do this. They do it because they have to. They don't take insurance because of all the paperwork headache, and since their customers are no longer using insurance, they are more likely to shop around. Thus competition has caused them to advertise their prices and to lower prices in response to more competition in the market.

Although a lot of the information in the program mirrored my own posts, it was still refreshing to see that some of this stuff DOES, in fact, exist.