“I am often asked if the free market can work in health care. My quick reply is: That is the only thing that works. At least, it is the only thing that works well.

Show me a health care market where there is no Blue Cross, no Medicare and no employer. I’ll bet it’s a market that works a lot like the markets for other goods and services.

In Overcharged: Why Americans Pay Too Much for Health Care (Cato: 2018), law professors Charles Silver and David Hyman make this same point in spades.

After several decades of trying everything from managed care to value-based purchasing, employers need to sit up and take note. The authors say the only thing that really holds down costs is giving money to the employees and letting them buy their own health care. “There is no health care cost crisis in the retail sector,” they write, and there “never has been.”

Atlas MD in Wichita, Kansas, for example, provides just about every service you can get at a primary care doctor’s office for $50 to $75 a month for adults (depending on age) and $10 for a child. Doctors are available by phone or email 24/7. Drugs cost less than what Medicaid pays. Medical tests are cheap.  A cholesterol test is $3, a tiny fraction of the charge that the lab they deal with bills to insurers. An MRI scan costs $400 instead of the typical third party charge of $2,000.

What about expensive hospital care? That too can look like retail medicine if you know where to look. The Surgery Center of Oklahoma (SOC), founded by Drs. Keith Smith and Steve Lantier, posts prices for 112 common surgical procedures. They deal mostly in cash and they don’t take Medicare or Medicaid or negotiate prices with insurance companies. One of SOC’s competitors is Integris Baptist Medical Center in Oklahoma City. The contrast couldn’t be starker, as the authors note:

Integris charged $33,505 for a complex bilateral sinus procedure, which helps patients with chronic nasal infections. This bill covered only hospitalization; the fees for the surgeon and the anesthesiologist were extra. At SOC, the all-inclusive price for the same operation is $5,885. Not surprisingly, Integris’s bill was loaded with overcharges, including $360 for a steroid available at wholesale for just 75 cents, and $630 for three doses of a pain killer called fentanyl citrate, which altogether cost the hospital about $1.50.”

New developments in retail medicine are almost always the product of entrepreneurial thinking. Sometimes the entrepreneurs are medical doctors. Sometimes they are business types with a strong interest in eliminating the many inefficiencies in traditional health care.”

Source: Employers Could Slash Their Health Costs Overnight. So, Why Don’t They?