How health care as a commodity screws both the poor and the affluent [View all]
A commodity is something you can have only if you have the money. It makes our health care vastly more expensive in two ways.
If you don’t have money, you can’t pay to treat problems when they are still cheap to treat, as in the case of the Maryland boy whose mother didn’t have $85 to extract an infected tooth. The infection spread to his brain, and the people of Maryland paid $230,000 to try to save his life. He died anyway.
On the other hand people who do have money (or good insurance) are oversold on unnecessary care. We spent $750 billion on unnecessary health care in 2011, about a third of all health care expenses. Invasive procedures that are unnecessary can result in injury or even death.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/09/07/we-spend-750-billion-on-unnecessary-health-care-two-charts-explain-why/
Health care policy is unique in that it is the only social issue where the morally right thing to do is also the cheapest thing to do.
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