Episode 492 Scott Adams: Capitalist Healthcare Plan That’s Either Brilliant, or the Opposite

Date: 2019-04-14 | Duration: 20:16

Topics

Capitalist version of a healthcare plan Healthcare Confusopoly - Whiteboard Business model of the press inhibits seeking, promoting solutions Suggestions for fixing healthcare Price Transparency Healthcare Insurer rebates if consumer finds bargains Market for health data sharing

Please donate to support my YouTube channel:
https://interface.my/ScottAdamsSays
I also fund my Periscopes and podcasts via audience micro-donations on Patreon. I prefer this method over accepting advertisements or working for a "boss" somewhere because it keeps my voice independent. No one owns me, and that is rare. I'm trying in my own way to make the world a better place, and your contributions help me stay inspired to do that.
See all of my Periscope videos here…
https://www.pscp.tv/ScottAdamsSays/1nAKERDOwylGL
Find my WhenHub Interface app here…
https://interface.whenhub.com

> [!note] Rough Transcript
> 
> This is an auto-generated transcript and may contain errors.

## Transcript

[0:04]

[Music] hey
hey everybody uh this is a single topic Periscope I thought I would hop on here to Salone news weekend and give you my plan for a capitalist capitalist version of a health care plan now here's the first thing you need to know about this I don't really know anything about Healthcare but neither do you and that's Point number one but uh I'm trying to learn as much as I can one of the ways I'm going to learn is I'm going to toss down some ideas I'm going to get some reaction and maybe we'll all learn something in the process so what you're going to see is not necessarily a good idea but it will make you think differently about it it will expand the way you're thinking about the topic and it will probably educate us all in the process when people tell me why this would or would not work now one of the things that most

[1:05]

not work now one of the things that most of you have been following me on Periscope know is that I'm unusually good at explaining things in simple ways and when you have this sort of superpower you have the the Spider-Man problem the Spider-Man problem is that with great power comes great responsibility and as funny as that sounds it's actually literally true uh we live in a world in which the people who have the ability to fix problems are the ones who do it because they can and because they feel the responsibility to do it they're the only ones who can so if the part if part of the health care dilemma is that the public doesn't understand it well and I'm really good at explaining things I thought well maybe I'll just jump in see if I can make any difference I'll try to

[2:06]

if I can make any difference I'll try to explain it to you at least as best I can and maybe we can all crawl forward on this at the same same time all right so the first question I have is just to make you think a little differently about the cost I've heard for example if you listen to Fox News they'll tell you that the cost of universal healthc care would be something like 32 trillion dollar over I don't know 10 years or whatever if you talk to the people on the left Bernie you'll say well close to free now $32 trillion and something closer to free is not the same movie so there's something going on here with how people are explaining to you the problem there's a big problem if you can't tell the difference between well might be 1 trillion but you know spread over a lot of people it's worth it it's close to free or $32 trillion and will destroy

[3:08]

free or $32 trillion and will destroy the entire economy of the planet Earth not the same movie now let me drill into this a little bit more my understanding and I'll ask you to fact check me this is that nobody in this country is denied Healthcare if you if you have some problem that requires an emergency room visit or a Hospital stay my understanding is that that will be provided to you it's just that you if you can't pay you don't so we're not really talking about covering more people at least for the expensive stuff and the vast majority of the expense is for hospitalization emergency room you know the serious stuff it's not for the you know the sprained ankle kind of stuff so given that all of that is being paid for now who can explain to me why it would cost more to do exactly the same thing

[4:08]

cost more to do exactly the same thing we're already doing now that should hurt your head if you've been listening to the Press tell you that it's impossible to pay for universal healthcare think about the fact that we already have it what we don't have is Universal Health Care insurance we actually have Universal Healthcare so why would it cost more to have what we already have so really the first thing you need to know is that we're talking about where the money is we're not necessarily talking about whether you need more of it because we're already paying for all the things that anybody is proposing we pay for now I'm exaggerating a little because the the routine doctor visits Etc would not be you know maybe people would just skip them and now they would go and have a routine visit when before they would not but I ask you this do those routine

[5:10]

not but I ask you this do those routine visits prevent the kind of hospitalization emergency room visits that actually cost all of us more because all of that's being absorbed in people's private insurance absorbed in the government's cost comes out your taxes somebody's paying for it and it's always the public ultimately it's always the
the public so uh given that the internet is starting to absorb a lot of the routine doctor visit stuff you can literally if you have a smartphone or even a friend who has a smartphone you can just sort of look up what you have you can use my uh my startups Service uh interfaced by one Hub is the name of the app and you can contact any kind of expert on there if and the expert will put a price and you just charge pay with your credit card so you could have a doctor if you're a little more concerned then you can make yourself Satisfied by looking at the internet

[6:10]

Satisfied by looking at the internet yourself but you don't have health care you can just pick up your phone download the app interface by wub and we're not the only ones who do this there are other telemarketing uh services and contact a doctor and say look at this do you think I need to go to the emergency room so the low end is sort of taking care of itself to a large extent all right so the real expense is in the stuff we're already paying for so now ask yourself do you feel that you've been duped because most of you've been told it's going to cost you something in in the in the many trillions of dollars to have Universal Health Care when we already have it we already have it right so if that's shocking you like you're thinking well wait a minute that can't be true why are we even talking about it if we already have it it's because people conflate the insurance with the actual service the

[7:11]

insurance with the actual service the service we're paying for it's already there it's already built into your cost right so the first thing to know is that you've probably been seriously lied to no matter what source you're looking at for this topic you probably have been so amazingly duped about what's going going on that you have no idea what the the source of the problem even is I would say that would describe most of the public now why are why is the public so ignorant well let me throw out a suggestion the normal way that the government should work is that the government comes up with ideas and plans and policies the Press reports on them the public decides whether they're persuaded what they like or what they don't like and then they feed that back to the government in the forms of voting Etc polls and voting and so this process has to work in order for anything to get done productively but the problem is that the

[8:13]

productively but the problem is that the Press at least the TV press is probably true of press in in general wherever it is is largely owned by the pharmaceutical companies you can you can see that for yourself just turn on CNN T turn on Fox News um the pharmaceutical companies are the primary big dollar sponsors for all of them so can the Press act independently if they had any opinions that were counter to what the pharmaceutical uh industry wanted well it would be darn hard so we probably have a business model situation in which the normal way that things work can't work so you have to probably depend on people like me who do not depend on pharmaceutical ads to maybe get you past the fact that the business model is designed to keep you uninformed certainly about the pharmaceutical end of it anyway so let me let me toss that an idea a few ideas

[9:16]

me let me toss that an idea a few ideas and they're just to chew on I'm not going to say that these are great ideas but just chew on them for a while suppose you had uh you proposed a a health care policy where set of policies that were were entirely a aimed at making sure that the market Works efficiently so the good Market uh efficiency is what has given us everything good in life uh so why not do more of that in healthcare and the reason that you can't do more of it is because Healthcare is what I call a confusopoly now that's a term that I invented um years ago and it's you it has its own Wikipedia page and uh actual professional economists use that term now so it's it's part of the literature if you Google confuse op you'll see it used um and I'm the one who invented it now what that is is an industry that confuses the consumers to the point where the consumers can't shop by Price

[10:20]

where the consumers can't shop by Price examples of this are your cell phone company if you try to compare two cell phone services you almost can't well not almost most you really can't do it because one one is has rollover minutes and the other doesn't one has a family plan one has you know they're leasing this or you're paying for this you need to ensure this it's so confusing that any one of those options can't reasonably be compared to the other so everybody gets some business because the the consumer just says I saw a commercial I'll get this one so they all stay in business uh if they had to compete by price because their products are presumably so similar you now that coverage is pretty much everywhere the products are really similar if they had to compete by price they would all go on a business because everybody would chase the lowest price until the price went down to the cost of of production and then there's no profit margin right so

[11:22]

then there's no profit margin right so cell phone companies are confusopoly uh insurance companies are largely confus opies you can't really even tell what's covered it's hard for you as a consumer to really compare it to another coverage you really can't so sales people have an advantage and if you trust the sales person or your your insurance broker you say well all right you seem like a nice person if you say that's the insurance I should have I can't tell so the other confused op is everything in the health care industry consumers cannot tell what anything cost cost is hidden from them um usually until they get a bill such as a hospital bill for example and even then they don't read it they don't care they can't doesn't matter because they have insurance and the insurance company is going to pay for it so how could you fix that imagine if the government said uh pass the following laws and just just brainstorming here

[12:22]

laws and just just brainstorming here suppose the government said the healthcare industry must have price transparency and it must be easy to search on Google Imagine for example that as a consumer you could tell that if you just drove for an extra hour you could get your MRI for 25% less suppose you knew that to be true would you do it no because the insurance is going to pay it anyway so you just go to your local one
one but suppose you also passed a law that says that all healthc care insurers have to offer off a discount for any consumers who find a bargain so they might say for example we'll pay for an MRI up to this cost if you can get it cheaper we'll split it with you because the insurance company saves money and the consumer gets a a discount and they get some of that discount they could actually make money by getting an MRI

[13:26]

actually make money by getting an MRI the consumer could actually make a profit now what would that do to the price of MRIs in the long run it would of course drive them down because there would be enough people who would be willing to drive that the that the local one's going to have to lower its
price now you say to yourself but wait you don't want the government micromanaging how how big must this discount be here's the great thing whatever they want so one company might one insurer might say I'm only going to give you 1% of whatever you save by shopping another might say we'll give you half another might say we'll give you 75% of it because we still make money it wouldn't matter what they offer because this too would be transparent so you as a consumer could say why would I have a health insurer that's only going to give me a 1% you know rebate for shopping for lower prices when there's another one

[14:28]

lower prices when there's another one that will give me 75% of course I'm going to change my insurance company so as long as you have price transparency both in the insurer and at the end product then the consumer is empowered to um to put in the extra work to find lower prices and to make some choices about well I you know this is the a treatment but I'm going to try the B treatment first just to see if it works all right then third imagine if the government said that I'm not sure what policies they would need to change maybe not but it suppos the government promoted uh consumers selling their own only their own health care data so let's say the government said let's make a market for your healthc care data and I'm talking about the the stuff you get from a monitor from a Fitbit something you would get from you know sensors that you could put on your phone something you would get from keeping a log for for example of what

[15:29]

keeping a log for for example of what you eat or how you exercise so you say look anybody who wants to can just get an app and start collecting their health information as much as they want or as little as they want because each subset will also have a market you know I could just sell my uh blood pressure and diet is just the only two things I sell for example so you make a market in it and this Market might be paid for by the insurers because they might say you know I I want that data and I want people who are tracking that data because they're good to ensure people who are tracking their data are probably going to be good customers if you're an insurance company so I would think that these three changes would in time solve all of health care because remember there I think there are somewhere between 14 and 18% who don't have healthare insurance in this country that's not a Giant number 14 18% and and the difference is

[16:32]

number 14 18% and and the difference is how good the economy is so a capitalist plan would be something like this let's take that 14% who don't have healthare and see if we can shrink it by improving the economy get that down to maybe 12% just by having a good economy a capitalist plan for that last 12% that's only an insurance cost because most of those people are actually getting the healthcare uh coverage they're just going to emergency rooms and not paying the bill but somebody's paying for that bill so the money exists in the system if you can make the system more efficient and the way you would make it more efficient is by uh government regulations that required to price transparency so consumers could shop but the health insurance companies would have to offer a rebate so if the consumer shops the consumer actually gets some of that money any any percentage that they want to because their cost will be transparent as well

[17:33]

their cost will be transparent as well so the the consumer can say well I'll go to an insurance company that gives me a bigger rebate because I'll I'll shop all day to save money and then create a market uh that's legitimate and has some standards for people who want to sell their health care now this is not just because you could make money at it it's because the healthc care industry would get better uh the more information they have about people's lifestyle and how that affects their health their health outcomes the more data they have the lower health care costs should be because you'll be able to catch things sooner you'll be able to tell people to avoid behaviors that you didn't know were dangerous before but now you've learned because you have all this data all
all right this is my set of ideas to think about today the big problem is that the healthcare industry is a confused if the government tries to fix it with detailed stuff it's too hard and they're

[18:36]

detailed stuff it's too hard and they're not they're never going to be able to do it because of the business model of the press and the fact that their advertisers do put a set of you know uh inhibiting forces on upon them so if you want any kind of big Healthcare fix it's going to have to be simple somebody said it just that that the very moment I was going to say it I comment came by that said keep it simple stupid yes what I've described I think would qualify as super simple now it might it would be hard to get the transparency Etc but it's easy to explain to the public it's easy to know what that is and it's easy to know if you're doing it right the execution will take some time you'd have to iterate it you know you have to work on it to get it to a high quality but you could do that it's just normal iteration and improve Improvement Cubans do that really well uh but everything about this I don't think anybody was confused by it

[19:37]

I don't think anybody was confused by it and I think you would agree that this would unlock the confusopoly turn it into a transparent Market Market forces would do what they do and then that little 12 or 14% who don't have insurance the economy will not be uh damaged by you know stepping it up and making it possible for them to get insurance too so that is all I have for today I'll keep it short and send me your comments in the um Twitter feed where you'll see this you can add your comments there and then I'll take a look at those later talk to you talk to you later