The Amish health care system
>How do the Amish keep costs so low? R&D (plus a few other sources) identify some key strategies.<p>>...the Amish are honorable customers. This separates them from insurance companies, who are constantly trying to scam providers however they can. Much of the increase in health care costs is “administrative expenses”, and much of these administrative expenses is hiring an army of lawyers, clerks, and billing professionals to thwart insurance companies’ attempts to cheat their way out of paying. If you are an honorable Amish person and the hospital knows you will pay your bill on time with zero fuss, they can waive all this.<p>Imagine how many social problems would disappear if people had more integrity and stronger morals. Literally every aspect of life would improve. But instead, we have to bulletproof everything (largely without success) from people who scheme and scam their way through life. We sink enormous costs into this, and it slows the progress and complicates life for everyone else.<p>I'm not a religious person, but the thing that the anti-religion movements have failed spectacularly at is providing a universal, teachable framework for basic morality. Religions, for all their faults, and for all of their misguided morality, at least had morality frameworks that were more or less unified and teachable. What do we have now in their place?