Free Market Irrationality

 

Physician payment models, especially fee-for-service, don’t give physicians any financial incentive to provide comprehensive care, he noted.

 

The piecework model rewards quantity over quality. Doctors make more money if they see a lot of patients, each for a short period of time, and send them off with prescriptions for drugs and referrals to see specialists.

 

Of course, this is just smart planning, right?  Make healthcare expensive and people will work extra hard not to get sick.  It's simple economics.

 

Except for where other financial interests - say, tobacco or fatty food sellers - actually benefit from people engaging in unhealthy lifestyles.  But that's just a supply-and-demand thing, right?  If people didn't want it, they wouldn't buy it.

 

Rational actors aren't persuaded by slick campaigns or suggestive advertisements designed to trigger emotional responses. 

 

And that's what people are - independent, rational actors.  To do the sociology thing is to impede individual success.

 

Really, what else matters?  To discuss cyclical poverty, workplace culture or anything education-related is to chatter on about non-fundamental stuff.  So too communicable diseases, crime, emergency preparedness and so forth.

 

Stick to the low-hanging fruit and quit wasting time on frills.  Everything else just magically takes care of itself that way, doesn't it?