“The conservative or free market ideas for lowering health care costs are completely different from the ideas of liberal academics espoused by the White House, most of which consist of price controls, more regulation, more mandates, more bureaucracy, whereas the free market approach is: ‘Let’s actually have a free market in health care, and consumers, as with every other sector of the economy, will actually pay for things that make sense from a cost-benefit standpoint.’
“If you let individuals actually make the decisions and give them the stake in this market, you’ll see people have a more sensible approach to health care spending, making reasonable decisions based on their needs and priorities. The entire problem with our system is that this isn’t how it works—in our system, individual patients have no connection to how much something costs. You have no knowledge of how much something costs, and therefore no incentive to do anything about it or make decisions that would result in lower costs.”
—Avik Roy, a health care analyst at Monness, Crespi, Hardt & Co. and author of the Apothecary Blog (http://www.avikroy.org), speaking on the Health Care News podcast about rising health care costs. Listen at: http://www.heartland.org/bin/media/podcasts/HealthCare/hcnpodcast12.mp3
