[an0malous]

The majority of healthcare products are not life saving treatments, nor do they require a solution here and now, and those solutions rarely happen immediately even when they do because of aforementioned horrendous service quality of the industry.

A standard healthcare visit looks like:

- you have some concerning symptoms

- you schedule an appointment with a doctor that’s at least several days if not weeks away

- you go to the appointment, wait 40 minutes, see the doctor for 10 minutes and they either prescribe you a medicine, request labs, imaging, or refer you to a specialist.

- if it’s either of the latter two, you have to book another appointment and this one is likely weeks out.

- you go to get imaging or see a specialist and repeat the loop from the second step

The whole process takes months, there’s plenty of time to for consumers to choose options but they aren’t presented with any. If you get a prescription, you just take what the doctor prescribed and you won’t even know how much it costs until you go to pick it up. You have no idea what the labs or imaging cost either, nor any options to choose where to get them. The whole system is just a huge mess of misaligned incentives.

[tavavex]

How does "this is less common in healthcare" become "this is irrelevant"? My point is that healthcare can never be treated as a free market because you'll be sacrificing the dying people, even if there are few of them. And even if you don't need a treatment here and now, an illness that you must deal with awards the healthcare industry infinite leverage. You can't choose not to be a customer, you have to pick someone, which means the providers can silently collude with one another. Even if you're not dying, the power and incentives in the healthcare industry are so misaligned that the market model is inherently rotten when applied to it.