Low-Cost Medical Tourism vs. The High Prices of the Two Cartels: Big Insurance and Big Medicine

Medical Tourism is a spontaneous order or sorts that has grown steadily to escape the increasingly high prices of the cartelized U.S. health care system. A cartelized system is one where price discovery is prevented or impeded, and I can't think of a better example of than the U.S. health care system, where one cartel, the Insurance Industry (MP: "Big Insurance"), negotiates prices and services with another cartel, the Medical Industry (MP: "Big Medicine").

This "Health Care Insurance Model" is, of course, protected and encouraged by the State, which not only enforces the high barrier of entry into either cartel, but also treats health insurance as a non-taxable employment benefit compared to income. It should be no surprise that "cartel pricing discovery" results in a "crisis" in terms of the "high cost of health care."

Today, the high prices of the cartelized health insurance model has now led many to adopt the language of "rights" when it comes to health care. Typically, high prices are not blamed on cartelization, but rather on market failure, for example, on "information asymmetry," or "inelastic demand," or whatever. However, if high prices were truly a case of market failure, then, obviously, there should be no medical tourisim market. That there are such markets indicates empirically that high prices have nothing to do with market failure, and thus appeals to health care as a positive right, i.e, a "coercive claim," should be examined skeptically. The more statists chirp about the "right" of health care, the more the medical tourism markets seem to exponentially expand.

~"Free Market Medicine"

HT: Ben Cunningham