HEALTH INSURANCE INSURES FINANCIAL RUIN.

I'm deliberately messing with the headline of a recent Reason article, "Health insurance doesn't just protect people from financial ruin. It insulates them from individual decisions about price and service quality," because the article reinforces a fundamental teaching point in economics, namely, when it is costly to discover prices, prices don't get discovered.  "It was as if the system was designed with only one goal in mind—maximizing not health or patient satisfaction but the amount of money Americans spend on health care. The fiscally ruinous results speak for themselves."

Author Peter Suderman fears things are not likely to get better anytime soon.  "Direct payment by quality-conscious consumers is an effective way of bringing down costs and total spending. Which is exactly why it will never happen at scale."

Perhaps not, although Market Watch's S. M. Flynn wants to give it the old Whole Foods (!?) try.

The first policy—price tags—is a necessary prerequisite for competition and efficiency. Under our current system, it’s nearly impossible for people with health insurance to find out in advance what anything covered by their insurance will end up costing. Patients have no way to comparison shop for procedures covered by insurance, and providers are under little pressure to lower costs.

Yup.

Price tags also insure that everybody pays the same amount. We currently have a health-care system in which providers charge patients wildly different prices depending on their insurance. That injustice will end if we insist on legally mandated price tags and require that every patient be charged the same price.

I believe he means "charged the same (list) price at a clinic, presumably we could have high-end and low-end clinics, the same way we have sleeping cars and coaches on trains.

The second policy—deductible security—pairs an insurance policy that has an annual deductible with a health savings account (HSA) that the policy’s sponsor funds each year with an amount equal to the annual deductible.

There are additional trade-tested betterments to consider.  Perhaps it might be prudent to experiment with a few now, before the so-called Medicare Part A trust fund runs out of money.

As long as we are doing the first day of class thing, let me acknowledge that the citation to one of these articles came from a past participant in the Northern Illinois Investment Association, which still appears to be active.