Start a business that does it right. If you can get past the regulators and such, and there are enough rational customers, you’d do better than everyone else, and they’d start copying you.
Well, good luck getting past regulators in a profession that operates as a self-regulating guild!
In my opinion, the only mechanism of competition that could conceivably ameliorate the systematic problems of medicine is the international medical tourism. However, I’m far from certain that free competition has much potential for preventing medicine from drifting away from reality, considering how much people are prone to biased and even outright magical thinking on this subject, even when all the incentives to get things right are in place.
I think business have to be more rational than people in general. If you pay for your own health care, this would be a problem, but if you have health insurance, they’ll just pay for what works.
Not necessarily. The whole rather absurd U.S. institution of employer-paid health insurance is an artifact of various government-imposed incentives whose roots range back to WW2-era wage controls. The employers are artificially incentivized to pay a part of the wages in medical benefits instead of cash—and if the employees value spurious medicine, there is no good reason for the employers to argue with their misconceptions. They’d happily pay part of the wages in astrological benefits if there was a comparable demand and regulatory incentive structure.
Of course, the employers would like to limit their overall expenses on medical benefits, but it’s far from clear that questioning the effectiveness of medicine is a practical way to do so, especially since it’s a strong social taboo. The idea of philistine and profiteering capitalists questioning the opinion of the wise and noble medical profession sounds blasphemous to the modern public opinion, and this could result in many bad consequences for the former.
Well, good luck getting past regulators in a profession that operates as a self-regulating guild!
In my opinion, the only mechanism of competition that could conceivably ameliorate the systematic problems of medicine is the international medical tourism. However, I’m far from certain that free competition has much potential for preventing medicine from drifting away from reality, considering how much people are prone to biased and even outright magical thinking on this subject, even when all the incentives to get things right are in place.
I think business have to be more rational than people in general. If you pay for your own health care, this would be a problem, but if you have health insurance, they’ll just pay for what works.
This is more-or-less the reason health insurance companies are so hated.
Not necessarily. The whole rather absurd U.S. institution of employer-paid health insurance is an artifact of various government-imposed incentives whose roots range back to WW2-era wage controls. The employers are artificially incentivized to pay a part of the wages in medical benefits instead of cash—and if the employees value spurious medicine, there is no good reason for the employers to argue with their misconceptions. They’d happily pay part of the wages in astrological benefits if there was a comparable demand and regulatory incentive structure.
Of course, the employers would like to limit their overall expenses on medical benefits, but it’s far from clear that questioning the effectiveness of medicine is a practical way to do so, especially since it’s a strong social taboo. The idea of philistine and profiteering capitalists questioning the opinion of the wise and noble medical profession sounds blasphemous to the modern public opinion, and this could result in many bad consequences for the former.