Responding to Incentives

I believe that people can be intelligent consumers of health care with the right information like anything else. A big part of the problem with health care is that the true cost is not borne or known by the users of health care. While there will always be a need for catastrophic health insurance to cover unexpected events, the more frequent costs could be covered by consumers. Tax policies have encouraged "all you can eat" health care paid for by a third party. No surprise that people in this regime would consume more health care at greater and greater costs. Not only is the demand higher, there is an incentive to shift costs on to third party payers.

Given this background, I found this piece from the WSJ interesting on new websites to assist with finding pricing information for medical procedures. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704222704574499623333862720.html