Back to episode — Episode 315 Scott Adams - Why Healthcare Costs Could Fall by 75%. With Whiteboard
One of the big challenges for even trying to understand healthcare and trying to figure out why everything is so expensive and where it's all going to go is how you categorize things. I've been trying for literally years to figure out what categories to look at to figure out where the big expenses are. And whenever you see an article on this or somebody's got some statistics about healthcare costs and breaking them down, they use slightly different categories. So it's just hard to make sense of where the opportunities are and where the problems are. But I'm going to give you one breakdown that I think is close to getting in the neighborhood of useful, and then I'm going to tell you all of the developments that are good news in those categories. So I've made the following categories of costs. These are the areas, and it's just one way you could break this down. There are lots of other ways you could break it down, and the problem is that all these areas overlap with the others. So there's a problem with getting them logically consistent. But generally speaking you've got people, you've got buildings, you've got drugs, you've got lab tests, you've got insurance, transportation, etc. And in every one of these cases there's something good happening that might lower those costs. So let's take a look at a few of those things.
Context —
Let's look at the cost of a doctor. We've got these direct pay options now where you can say for $150 a month you can have all the doctoring you need by the same doctor who is a direct pay doctor. So there are a number of them already. They seem to be popular and they work well. And you know, it's the free market doing its thing. So that could be a huge improvement in the cost of just the doctor's…
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