Ben Handel

It's just a list.

It's a list of saying, we allow this.

And they have to know the answer to that question because they're going to cover it or not.

If you take another step and you said, OK...

Now we want to know the prices.

Then I agree with you.

Then healthcare providers, they're often not going to really quote prices.

And it's very complicated for the insurer to say this is what the price is going to be for this service because the provider might do six things and they don't know which six things they're going to do.

Now let's think about the cost, your other question, for the overall system.

This is also complicated because

And the reason it's complicated is that it relates very closely to just how do you design a health system overall?

The reason is that unlike many products like retail products on Amazon or whatever, healthcare system and healthcare system design, they're set up to ration care.

What do you mean by ration?

So most products, consumers have money.

And they either buy them or they don't.

And then Econ 101 applies, supply, demand, etc.

In health care, there's a whole host of other issues, and those issues are caused by the fact that as a society, we don't want to make people pay for all of their own health care.

Say someone has a serious disease, going to cost $80,000, and that person has no money.

We want them to get care, but we don't want them to pay for it.

That means we're in a world where price rationing doesn't work.