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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

> the next logical step is to allow physicians to have pharmacies

Am I missing snarkasm? I used to work for a multi-doctor practice. We had our own pharmacy; one of my assignments was to figure out if it was profitable.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

re: diogenes

A quick glance suggests to me that the study only measures cost, not where the money goes. The three possibilities that jump to my mind are profit, waste, and subsidies to other forms of healthcare. The first one is the most likely to my mind, mainly cost in the form of rent to the artificially limited resource of doctors. Assuming the artificial limitation is fixed, deploying them here is a form of waste.

But I want to stick in a word about the third. My pet peeve about American healthcare is that it is not transparent. A lot of medical billing is inflated in the hope that it will pay for unprofitable sectors, particularly ER. This is a form of price discrimination, one of the largest examples I know. In theory, monopolistic price discrimination and competition both produce efficient outcomes. But I'd feel a lot safer with government interventions (subsidies, for example) in a price system than a monolithic system designed for non-transparency.

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