[wpietri]

And just in case my implication isn't clear, I think the notion of comparison shopping for treatment is insane. My mother was seriously ill last year, and the last thing we had time to do was get a serious of estimates and do a cost-benefit analysis on treating her brain tumor. Just understanding the treatment options was plenty. And, of course, picking the right doctors, because this actually was brain surgery. Oh, and we had to deal with the a loved one having a brain tumor. Little thing, that.

[kiba]

I believe surgery can be made cheaper through scaling surgery operation. This will in turn increase the reliability of surgeons as they become more experienced in surgery.

In some case, cheaper actually means better surgeon. Obviously, this won't work as well for surgery procedure that are more exotic.

This is already true in heart surgery:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125875892887958111.html

[wpietri]

Interesting, but irrelevant. There are all sorts of good approaches to cost containment in medicine. The blog "The Incidental Economist" covers them regularly. None of them rely on seriously ill people pulling out the Sunday supplement and seeing who has the best deal this week on heart bypass surgery.