AAQ
“Competition is the “thing” that typically stops suppliers from raising prices. Econ 101.”
Problem is after Econ 101 you need to take more advanced courses.
Many basic tenets of Econ 101 do not apply to healthcare.
Take the most basic tenet, that of supply and demand . In Econ 101 you are taught if strawberries are too expensive then people will stop eating strawberries and buy blueberries forcing the price of Strawberries to come down.
If stents become expensive its not like the demand for them (ie Heart attacks) will go down. Furthermore if someone is having a heart attack they can’t exactly shop around for the cheapest care.
Even if it ISN’t an emergency shopping around is almost impossible,. This experiment has been done. One of the most frequent reasons people go to a hospital is for childbirth. OF course there are occasionally complications, but generlaly the stay is pretty routine and predictable. Furthermore you have a 9 month headstart to plan where to give birth. You would think finding he cheapest place is straightforward. Yet it is near impossible. There was an attempt to chaneg this with the Hospital Price Transparency Law signed by President Trump, but it is still near impossible to find this information.
Furthermore there is a Knowledge discrepancy between you and the healthcare system, underming basic economic principals (which assume a level playing field). Yo ucan easily dewtermine the difference between strawberries and blueberries. IT is much harder to determine the difference between getting a few stents vs bypass surgery