John C. Goodman

John Goodman's Priceless is a revelation. If you think the U.S. healthcare industry should 100% be run by the government and/or bureaucrats, you owe it to yourself to be familiar with the other side of the argument. And not just the easily digestible sound bites either, the ones that fill up no more than a tweet. There's a lot of disagreement on this subject. The discourse is like a multi-generational feud with no end in sight.

Mr. Goodman centers his case around two points: Price and Incentives. And the two are certainly related. In any market, if prices are obscure or hidden, the buyer doesn't have enough information to make consistently good purchasing choices. But people will say, "When it comes to your health, why should prices matter?" They matter because they're a strong, neutral signal of value. In other words, if prices are obscured, the product's worth is obscured, and the buyer doesn't have enough information to make an informed choice. This then leads to misaligned incentives. Without the balancing effect of prices, you simply cannot engineer a system to encourage people to make specific choices without unintended consequences.

A common counter-argument is that healthcare isn't a normal market because good health is something we all need, something everyone deserves. This is true. But I don't agree that the correct choice is to run the other way, to assume that market forces don't apply more than they do. People need to be allowed to make their own choices just as much as they should have a right to quality healthcare.

Discussing this is like discussing politics or religion—there's a potential for plenty of shouting over a wide chasm of disagreement. However, if you're even close to being on the fence on the issue, read this book. Healthcare is a complex system being affected by countless numbers of good people with good intentions making bad judgment calls. Help yourself become more informed.… (altro)