Under a long-standing convention unexamined in today’s debates, health insurance is one thing and health care is something else, the former’s principal purpose being to enable patients to afford the latter. Although consumers can choose among financing plans, the content (and thus the costliness) of the care they expect to receive is not negotiable. Instead, all insured patients are essentially entitled, by common law or otherwise, to both provider services meeting a poorly specified “standard of care” and plan payment for all care deemed “medically necessary.” These near-universal terms of entitlement amount to an industry-friendly system of command-and-control regulation because applying them requires reference to medical experts. The professional paradigm of medical care these experts bring with them essentially holds that patients should receive, at whatever cost, any service with some chance of yielding a medical benefit.
https://qz.com/1010259/the-100-billion-per-year-back-pain-industry-is-mostly-a-hoax/
https://qz.com/1010259/the-100-billion-per-year-back-pain-industry-is-mostly-a-hoax/
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