Economism and Health Care

A core feature of competitive markets, according to the basic model, is that they allocate goods to the people or companies that are willing to pay the most for them. In theory, and in many situations, this is a good thing: If I am willing to pay $1,000 for a custom portrait of my (daughter’s) dog, and you are only willing to pay $1 for it, then aggregate satisfaction is likely to be higher if I get the portrait. But not always: If I am willing to pay $10 for a turkey sandwich, but you are only willing to pay $1 because you only have $1, and have no borrowing capacity, then society may very well be better off if you get the sandwich. Yet in an ordinary, healthy market, I get the sandwich.

This problem is acutely apparent when it comes to health care. People place a high value on not dying, but when it comes to the allocation of medical treatment, they can’t bid more than their income allows. The obvious result is that markets deliver unnecessary procedures to rich people while denying essential care to poor people—because that’s what markets do. Obamacare attempted (with mixed success) to mitigate this problem. The Trump administration is rhetorically committed to deregulating health insurance; the question is whether they are willing to accept the political consequences of pricing millions of people out of not dying.

This is the topic of my new guest post, “Health Care and John D. Rockefeller’s Dog,” on Econbrowser (a fabulous economics blog, by the way, written by Menzie Chinn and James Hamilton). For more, head on over there.