The man that wants to effectively nationalize the entire health insurance industry doesn’t even know that existing health insurance companies don’t cover optional cosmetic surgery.
Realizing that fewer than four in 10 Americans favor outright abolishing private health insurance, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has attempted to tweak his Medicare For All bill. He claims that now he won’t outlaw private insurance, but instead relegate it to “nose jobs.”
As with most things that emerge from the septuagenarian’s sentiments, Sanders’ proposal is inadvertently wise. It confirms that the free market is the only force capable of saving healthcare.
Consider that even as healthcare costs spiral out of control, the inflation-adjusted prices of the top 10 most popular cosmetic procedures have fallen over the past two decades. As the overall consumer price index increased by 47.2% from 1998 to 2016, the price of the most popular cosmetic procedure, Botox injections, fell by 11.3%. The reason? Botox is almost never covered by insurance or by the government.
[ Also read: No new senators sign onto Bernie Sanders’ expanded Medicare for All act]
Even the prices of invasive surgeries have fallen in real dollars. And although they did increase in price, breast augmentations increased at only half the rate of the total consumer price index increase from 1998 to 2016. And the price of aforementioned rhinoplasties only barely surpassed the consumer price index and fell far short of healthcare inflation.
The rest of the healthcare industry, the part subsidized by insurance companies and government, has seen prices double and (in the case of hospital services) nearly triple.
The cosmetic medicine industry demonstrates the value of price transparency and the benefits of removing third-party payers. When consumers are made to shop around for prices, their demand becomes more elastic. This ultimately pulls prices down. By contrast, the bulk of the healthcare industry relies on patients not acting like consumers and removing them from the price-setting process. It’s why our current private health insurance system is bad and why our current Medicare system, which has reimbursement rates 20% lower than the private system, is downright abysmal.
Bernie’s plan will inevitably require massive tax increases, and if collapsing systems in Finland and the United Kingdom are any indication, Medicare For All will cause the definition of “vital” care to contract, so that people will be less able to access preventable care, the most cost effective aspect of any healthcare plan.
President Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services is correct to pursue policies to maximize price transparency. The private industry has already seen a large and necessary expansion of concierge care systems, in which patients pay a medical practice a flat retainer directly, which incentivizes patients to seek preventative care and enables doctors to see fewer patients due to removing the insanity of the insurance bureaucracy.
Sanders may not have realized it, but the market for nose jobs is about a thousand times more functional than the market for services that Medicare covers. His plan may crowd out private health insurance as he hopes, or it may just create a second tier of price-transparent, concierge care for those who can still afford it after the tax hit.
Sanders knows nothing about healthcare, but he still wants you to trust him to nationalize and control one-fifth of the United States economy.
Source Article from https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/bernie-says-blue-shield-will-be-relegated-to-nose-jobs-insurance-doesnt-cover-optional-cosmetic-surgery
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