The Guy Who Shopped Around for Hernia Surgery

Here is the opening thought in a Ezra Klein column that I had to read so that you don't have to, dear reader.

 Health care and education pose the same basic threat to the economy: How do you keep costs down for a product that consumers must purchase? Saying “no,” after all, is how consumers typically restrain costs. If Best Buy Co. wants to charge you too much for a television, you can walk out. You might want a television, but you don’t actually need one. That gives you the upper hand. When push comes to shove, producers need to meet the demands of consumers. But you can’t walk out on medical care for your spouse or education for your child.

There is so much wrong here that I could blog all day about it, but I'll just tackle this one small piece. Klein is overtly wrong.  Actually, you can walk out, and it just so happens that the WSJ carries an op-ed today that recounts the story of someone who did just that, literally just walked out, and got the needed medical care at a fraction of the original proposed cost.  This could be replicated on a massive scale to drive down the cost of healthcare across the board.  But that would require unshackling consumers and providers to contract together, and that would make the central planners and the noblesse oblige left go bonkers.