Opaque and sky high bills are breaking Americans, and our health care system
The problem is US health care providers are immune to true competition:<p>1. They often enjoy state-sanctioned monopolies in the form of overly restrictive licensing laws. They&#x27;re basically unions that enshrine certain false assumptions about what form of training is necessary to accomplish tasks.<p>2. They don&#x27;t even have to be held to any cost agreements.<p>How can you have competition or any kind of viable health care economy when no one actually knows the price of a service until it is set by the provider after the fact, and there is no way of offering an alternative means of offering the service?<p>It&#x27;s absurd. I don&#x27;t even understand how most of this is legal. The price should be set beforehand, or at least there should be an estimate on request, and the final price should be with in a small fraction of that estimate, and licensing should be dramatically loosened or eliminated, to allow providers who are competent but have alternate educational paths (e.g., optometrists expanding their practice, or psychologists prescribing, or nurses or pharmacists increasing their role).