Here’s my way of explaining one cool way that healthcare will get cheaper. Picture a stack of papers. It’s maybe a few feet tall, and each paper represents some kind of healthcare-related service that could be delivered. For example, one of those sheets represents a triple bypass. Another represents a consultation about asthma. Another represents an MRI imaging. There are tons of them! Now picture that they are arranged in order of simplest procedure (at the bottom of the stack) to the most complex procedure (at the top of the stack). So we’ve got administering someone with a vaccine and stuff like that at the bottom of the stack, all the way up to, say, some crazy brain surgery at the very top of the stack.
Obviously only the most super-specialized physicians can do brain surgeries and other similarly complex services, while probably a technician or medical assistant could administer vaccines. Thus, we could draw lines on that stack of papers that look like this:
A physician could do anything in his section of papers, and he could probably also do (maybe with a little practice) anything that a nurse or technician could do. But he isn’t trained to do anything above his line–only specialists can do those things.
Now on to how healthcare will become cheaper. As our medical knowledge and technology increase, things that used to require great training become simpler. For example, hip replacements used to be so complex that only the most highly trained specialists could do them. Now, thanks to better man-made sockets and such, they are much simpler to perform, and probably any orthopedic surgeon could perform one and get outcomes that are better than in 1980. In short, the lines move up as technology and knowledge progresses.
This saves money mostly because a technician’s time is less costly than a nurse’s time, a nurse’s time is less costly than a physician’s time, and so forth.
And, I should probably mention two other things. First, there is another, lower cost, caregiver emerging: the patient himself. These days, who do you think primarily takes care of diabetic patients? The diabetic himself! Second, I don’t know if specialists will become extinct any time soon, since there are always papers being added to the stack as we find out we can do more and more things to heal people.
And one last thing: I said all this will make healthcare cheaper–meaning the actual cost of the provision of care will decrease for a lot of diseases–I didn’t say this will reduce our total spending on healthcare. Why not? Because as we learn how to do new, crazy surgeries and stuff, we’ll probably start spending lots of money on those, and that will likely more than outweigh the spending reductions we’ll get as a result of what I described above.
Clear Thinking on Healthcare 