I understand that the economists who made this study are not the ones calling the shots on the (bad) way the health insurance business is conducted, but man, they&#x27;re pretty dense if you take the article at its word.<p>&quot;To health economists, this sounded like good news; they&#x27;ve long theorized that higher deductibles would force down health-care costs. The idea was that higher deductibles would make patients become smarter shoppers: If they had to pay more of the cost, they&#x27;d likely choose something closer to the $1,529 appendectomy than the $186,955 appendectomy (yes, some doctors really do charge that much). This would push the really expensive doctors to lower their prices so cheaper physicians didn&#x27;t steal their business.&quot;<p>Even the sloppiest and most cursory examination of human behavior refutes this line of thinking-- patients don&#x27;t shop around for life-saving medical procedures because they need them urgently or semi-urgently, meaning locations close-ish to home are the only choices, if there&#x27;s even more than one choice that accepts their insurance. For plastic surgery, sure, whatever. For a bypass? No. I guess this gaping hole in their analysis went unnoticed or somehow explained away by their insufficient economic model.<p>&quot;The new paper shows that when faced with a higher deductible, patients did not price shop for a better deal. Instead, both healthy and sick patients simply used way less health care.&quot;<p>I would expect to see more plans converted to high-deductible plans after a finding like this percolates through the insurance companies. This behavior is health insurance working as designed: unused, making a fat profit for the insurers while the patients scrape by until they&#x27;re in critical condition and can&#x27;t refuse care for the sake of cost-cutting on their end. This system is evil, and it is intentionally evil for the sake of producing more money.<p>&quot;&quot;I am a little bit surprised at just how poorly patients were able to do when looking at very similar products, like MRI scans, and with a shopping tool,&quot; says Kolstad, an economist at University of California Berkeley and one of the study&#x27;s co-author. &quot;Two years in, and there&#x27;s still no evidence they&#x27;re price shopping.&quot;&quot;<p>This man is a fool of the highest order, truly an overflowing septic tank of stupidity unparalleled in obliviousness even when compared to a slime mold. How are patients supposed to understand comparisons between medical procedures? &quot;A shopping tool&quot; would be too simplistic, anyway. You need a real doctor to answer questions about care choices.<p>&quot;Workers&#x27; health spending dropped, and did so quickly. Average per-patient spending fell from $5,222.60 in 2012 to $4,446.08 in 2013. That&#x27;s about a 15 percent decline in a single year — and it held true across all types of health services. Between 2012 and 2014, there was a 25 percent drop in emergency room spending, an 18 percent decline in physician office visits, and a 6 percent decrease in mental health services.&quot;<p>Great job, the patients have been made sicker as a result of cost-cutting measures. Looking forward to seeing more high-deductible plans.<p>Finally, there is no &quot;shopping around&quot; in the sense these economists mean. Try getting a straight itemized quote for a given medical procedure before you get it. Try comparing that with someone else&#x27;s quote for the same thing. At this point, you&#x27;ve probably wasted a few weeks on the phone&#x2F;email trying to finagle these things out of the horrendous systems in place. Then, you can cross reference the results with your insurance benefits, and see how badly you&#x27;re going to get fucked. Yeah, right.