vol. 1 issue 29
Greetings,
Have you given up talking about how healthcare in the US might be delivered more efficiently and affordably? Do you figure it’s a lost cause at this point, and so just hope for the best while you grit your teeth to make your monthly premium?
My guest on this episode of the docu-mental podcast is Olivia Webb. She’s a healthcare consultant at The Open Markets Institute, a think tank dedicated to reclaiming the debate over how best to apply antitrust laws in this country.
After four decades of antitrust law enforcement being in service to something called “consumer welfare” — essentially, practices that lead to goods and services being offered at the lowest price possible — I think it’s important to examine how this has cut into our rights as citizens. I even wonder aloud in this episode if the primacy of consumerism is antithetical to citizenship in a democracy, whether being told that the kind of “convenience” that is offered by conglomerates like CVS comes at the expense of informed choice.
Think about it: without the power to choose, we no longer have the power to exercise our freedoms. Without freedom, what is democracy?
And, when health insurers, of which there are fewer now than ever thanks to a series of mergers in the last decade, are the ones telling us which doctors we can and can’t see, and are the ones telling physicians which drugs they can and can’t prescribe, where is our freedom, much less, the “consumer welfare”?
We are all witness to the fact that our healthcare is not delivered at the lowest cost possible. But we don’t know why, and we don’t know what “the lowest cost possible” should look like because the system is so opaque.
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