Healthcare Monstrosity 2⧸3： Sasan Sadat Presents The Economic Problems With Real Solutions [livi0oApAPU]

00:00 I'm just going to assume that the people who wrote this bill have good intentions. I am assuming that right now, that the people who wrote this bill really truly believe it will help people they're just clueless all i'm doing here is educating people and not trying to scare anyone uh... i'm not trying to make allegations of conspiracy i'm saying that Governments do not have the power to override the basic principles of economics. They don't, that the laws of economics do not care about your good intentions so with that I've already talked about all the problems are going to happen

00:38 as a result of the health care bill. Now, as promised last time I'm going to go over solutions real solutions to help bring healthcare costs back down to hopefully reasonable levels if not at least somewhat of a help and what you'll notice is that these solutions that i'm giving you have a theme in common to them they...you might notice a trend among these solutions so here they are How many of you out there knew that right now in the United States, there are actual laws against importing cheaper prescription drugs? How many of you out there actually knew that? I didn't find out until a couple months ago. It is literally illegal to buy inexpensive drugs!

01:29 You're not allowed to import them from Mexico. That's probably part of the war on drugs horseshit! Right, you go to Mexico where the war on drugs is raging and you can get the same prescription drugs that you would hear at maybe a tenth of the price and the quality would be exactly the same I don't know how many have been to the Mexican border recently but if you cross the border you will be inundated with pharmacies everywhere. I mean on every block, every other store is a pharmacy and that is simply to meet the demand of all the Americans crossing the border to get cheaper prescriptions because they cannot afford the expensive American stuff and US law prevents them from buying the cheaper stuff so right there that's one solution repeal the laws

02:17 that ban importing cheaper drugs and the cost of your medical care will go down. That's one solution right there. Let's talk about another one, how many all knew this? If a doctor just normal practitioner family doctor chooses to advertise their services like say if they take out an advertisement at TV spot what have you they run the risk of losing their license Seriously, if a doctor wants to advertise like if they want to say my rates are lower than Dr. X or my wait times are less than Dr.X or I spend more time than Dr. X with the patients they are in trouble danger of losing their license now once you think about that for second what kind of perverse incentives

03:05 that creates. So again, that's the phrase I introduced to you last week perverse incentives. In other words what kind of unintended consequences does that create? Well let's think about that if a doctor is not allowed to advertise it's much more difficult for a consumer to make a choice about which doctor is better. In other words, the competition between doctors is not as severe as they would be before which mean their prices go up and their quality of care goes down. Because of the licensing? At the same time if you as a doctor don't have to worry about advertising my rates are less than that doctor or by wait times are less than that doctor. If you don't have to worry about bragging about those things, you do not have as much of an incentive to actually do those things. You know if your not allowed to brag about how low your prices are what incentive do you have to really lower prices? So if you're not allowed to brag about how quick and the quality of service whats really the incentive

04:07 to actually invest the time and effort to do that if you can't brag about it and get more customers as a result of it. So right there, there's another thing that could be repealed take away the prohibitions on advertising between doctors will force them to be more competitive their prices will go down but quality care will go up because they are now competing with each other more directly There has been a law in books for quite some time now prohibiting insurance companies from selling policies across state lines. Think about what this does, what this law does when you limit a consumer's choices you're basically limiting the supply

04:07 to actually invest the time and effort to do that if you can't brag about it and get more customers as a result of it. So right there, there's another thing that could be repealed take away the prohibitions on advertising between doctors will force them to be more competitive their prices will go down but quality care will go up because they are now competing with each other more directly There has been a law in books for quite some time now prohibiting insurance companies from selling policies across state lines. Think about what this does, what this law does when you limit a consumer's choices you're basically limiting the supply

04:49 In other words, the supply is getting less. Because supply gets less price goes up that's basic supply and demand so if you're wondering why these sorts of regulations are in place to prevent people from buying insurance across state lines It is specifically so that they can charge more, so they don't have to compete with as many other health insurers. So once again that's another thing that could be done you could repeal that law and allow insurance companies to offer policies across state lines Most doctors are required by law to carry medical malpractice insurance. They have to carry this insurance at all times, and you may think that's a good thing but what it ends up doing is making them a target for litigation and the doctors that actually are forced to carry this are often much more victimized by frivolous lawsuits and doctors that do not have to carry this insurance because if you're going to sue a doctor

04:49 In other words, the supply is getting less. Because supply gets less price goes up that's basic supply and demand so if you're wondering why these sorts of regulations are in place to prevent people from buying insurance across state lines It is specifically so that they can charge more, so they don't have to compete with as many other health insurers. So once again that's another thing that could be done you could repeal that law and allow insurance companies to offer policies across state lines Most doctors are required by law to carry medical malpractice insurance. They have to carry this insurance at all times, and you may think that's a good thing but what it ends up doing is making them a target for litigation and the doctors that actually are forced to carry this are often much more victimized by frivolous lawsuits and doctors that do not have to carry this insurance because if you're going to sue a doctor

05:53 you feel much better about it or much less guilty about it if you knew that their insurance was going to pay for it. And judges feel much less guilty about awarding huge sums of money, if they know that the insurance is gonna pay for it and the thing is if a doctor's being enforced to carry this malpractice insurance anytime any other doctor on this policy, any other doctor gets sued everybody's rates goes up. In other words doctors are all being punished for the malpractice of other doctors because they're all being tied together on this insurance system so that is another thing right there you could do. You could repeal the requirement for doctors to carry malpractice insurance that would send health care rates even lower

06:40 Last solution, but you know certainly not all of them. I can think of a million ways to do this these are just the top five and probably the least controversial that i could think of there have been for probably about 150-160 years now limitations legal limitations on the number of doctors allowed to enter practice in the country they do this through licensing Licensing restricts the number of doctors allowed to practice. Now obviously, once again supply and demand you've got a lower supply of doctors that translates to higher prices and some would argue that's why the licensing was introduced in the first place. That doctors felt they weren't being paid enough so they used licensing to sort of cut off their competition and keep the group of doctors as small as possible so they can charge as much money as possible

07:34 Now you may think that licensing is a good thing, that it prevents say quack doctors from operating or people without the proper skills from operating. But in the long run there's a lot more negative consequences to licensing than there are positive consequences now sure like I said you may help to eliminate some of the quack doctors but the same time now there's less doctors the price goes up because a price goes out people are less likely to be able to afford medical care in the first place uh... personally against all license right you know whether it's real estate or anything right any people were actually you know licensing is a former communism and i'm hungry yeah medias and people worry about the quality of doctors they think that he had licensing to guarantee

08:24 the quality of doctors, well no you don't. Competition will guarantee that. What licensing guarantees is that everything will be more costly and there will be less of it. That's what licensing guarantees. It doesn't actually guarantee that the quality of a doctor will go up as I mentioned already the price will go up your less likely to afford it which means your less likely have access in the first place so what does it matter if they're licensed or not? If you can even afford it The other thing is as I mentioned before If doctors are less competitive because there's less of them, they're less inclined to do a good job when it comes time to treating you. They will care less about you. They'll spend less time on you. Quality will go down so licensing may be designed to increase the quality of care but in the long run it actually decreases the quality because doctors just don't have the inclination and don't have the time to do a proper job