Less Is More IV

MANDATORY MARCUS

Remember those retail health clinics we talked about just a few days ago?  This Wall St. Journal article points out that they are already expanding services and driving doctors' groups and hospitals to react in two entirely predictable ways:

1. They are pressing insurance companies on co-payments to these facilities to eliminate any financial incentive to use them.  (We'll call this the bad response)
2. They are acting more competitively themselves:  Doctors offices are expanding office hours into evenings and weekends and hospitals are opening more urgent care centers to treat relatively minor health problems.  (We'll call this the good response)

What you can predict will happen next is that doctors' groups and hospitals (and possibly insurance companies in collusion with them) will begin lobbying members of Congress to help create legislation to prevent any further expansion of retail health clinics; and thus prevent the further erosion of doctors' and hospitals established market position. 

And there lies a very large potential problem...the possibility that the government intervenes in the market's natural evolution towards greater competition, lower prices and higher quality...while simultaneously claiming to want to lower prices and improve quality. 

Oh the irony! 

I remain hopeful that our government wouldn't stoop to such shenanigans.  I also remain hopeful that one day Publishers Clearing House will come through with that $10 Million Dollar super prize so I can finally add them to my blocked sender list.

And thus continues the ongoing triumph of hope over experience....