Bernie Sanders Had a Threesome

What is the biggest problem in healthcare? Well, there are many… but really, it’s the lack of price transparency. Unless your brain is totally smooth, you know that healthcare has some issues:

1. For the consumer:

   1. Accessibility to care (I literally don’t know how to book an appointment)

   2. Not having a real relationship with a doctor (you usually have to switch all your doctors when you switch jobs because of the networks)

   3. Dealing with insane bureaucracy (if your eye falls out of its socket, you need to see a general MD so they can refer you to an eye doctor)

2. For the supplier (healthcare is kinda shitty for the companies too):

   1. The cost of medical devices and procedures

   2. Dealing with lawsuits from crazy patients

   3. For good doctors, being forced into playing business against competitors who don’t care about giving good care.

And on and on and on and on…

But the biggest issue… is price transparency. All of these other problems are born from the shadows and obfuscation that exists when the supplier is not required to inform the consumer about: (1) what they are actually buying and (2) how much it will cost.

You don’t get told the prices until after you pay…

How can we be living in a free market when we can’t price shop?… in the industry that makes up the biggest portion of our GDP? 

If I am an entrepreneur, how can I start up a new competitor if I have no visibility into the granular economics of the industry? Realistically, you can’t. Which kills competition and destroys the market.

So the government needs to intervene and regulate this dogshit.

But excitingly, there’s some good recent news from our esteemed government: A healthcare price transparency bill with bipartisan support. How we have gotten to a place where both republicans and democrats agree on a bill to regulate healthcare, I do not know…. It’s like finding an agreeable third person for a threesome. It’s a miracle. It really is a miracle. More on threesomes later….

The price transparency problem in healthcare is SO bad that it’s inspired collaboration between people with staggeringly opposing views. For example, Mike Braun — Republican Senator from Indiana, and a wealthy business man who made a fortune in… tractor equipment… smart fucker if you ask me. “Braun opposes the Affordable Care Act, same-sex marriage, abortion, and a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants…. Braun defended Trump's efforts to overturn the election results.” This guy thinks the healthcare companies are past the point of return, ethically speaking.

As does Chuck Grassley, the longest serving Republican in the senate, from Iowa. He’s also supporting the bill. He’s anti-weed, anti-gay marriage, and holds an A+ rating from the NRA for his support of guns… and the way the healthcare companies operate is so glaringly bad that he feels a need to step in and do something about it.

And at the same time… you’ve got Bernie. Price transparency is so bad in healthcare, that it’s got anti-abortion gun nuts and Bernie working together.

It’s exciting to see. People who agree on nothing else are working together and addressing the shittiest part of being an American. It’s as if Bernie found a dream menáge.

In Singapore — consistently rated near the top for healthcare — when you walk into a hospital you get a menu style list of every procedure and price. They go so far as to include the success rate and re-hospitalization rate for procedures. So you can price shop: Dr. Jim costs $19k for the double-bypass, but he kills 1% of his patients… Dr. Gwen costs $24k, but she only kills .2% of people. Fuck it… I think it’ll go with Dr. Gwen. You can do that in Singapore. And you don’t need to go through all this crazy paperwork and be afraid of bills coming 2 years later. In Singapore, you pay for your medical the same way you do when you buy a TV (in a shlumpy sriracha-stained sweatsuit while taking the day off work).

And maybe we’re not too far off from that in the USA, provided these Senators can keep working together to ram their rods down the throats of the greedy bastards running the healthcare industry.

A little more info here if you’re interested.