Health Care Supply

Lately I have been reading lots of stories about a constrained supply of health care. In some countries, people have to wait for a long time for procedures. In the United States, there are often long waits in emergency rooms. A recent trend has been doctors declining to serve Medicare and Medicaid patients for financial reasons. There is a growing shortage of general care physicians in the United States, and there has been a shortage of nurses for years now. Ultimately, the cost of nonexistent health care doesn't matter.

There's no easy way to correct these problems, but there are two areas where conditions can be improved: providing health care can be made to be easier, and providing health care can be made to be more profitable.

Currently there are many hurdles to providing health care. There's lots of schooling, there's lots of paperwork, and there are many complicated laws that must be complied with. Some of these things can be simplified, but few people are even trying. Taxes on small (or all, or health-care-related) businesses can be reduced or eliminated. Requirements can be streamlined or eliminated. And so on.

There exists in the minds of some the idea that profit is objectively bad. On the contrary: profit, as a motivator, is much preferred to several popular alternatives, such as power and lust. (I prefer to avoid having to provide sexual favors in order to receive health care.) Profit is a more effective motivator, taken across the entire population, than altruism. Attempts to make health care less profitable inevitably decrease the number of health care providers.

The opposite is also true: making health care more profitable will result in more organizations competing for your health care dollars. More competition will lower costs. More providers will lower wait times.

What do I care if a doctor, or the CEO of a hospital, is filthy rich? I care about getting a quality product at a good price. If someone can figure out how to make their customers (patients) happy while simultaneously turning a profit, let them.