The Cost of Eliminating Prices

If you're looking for some worthwhile snowed-in reading, Kevin Williamson's recent National Review essay, "Priceless Is Worthless," would be an edifying use of your time. In sum:

... as we continue to pretend that there is another unseen economic reality beyond market prices when it comes to health care, banking, housing, labor, cotton, sugar, fuel-efficient Japanese automobiles, solar panels, and every other product with prices distorted by politics--whose interests do you imagine are being served? Yours, chump?

A timely example:

Health-care prices are a mishmash for lots of reasons, but one of the main ones is the way we pay for health care--you don't pay the doctor, your insurance company does, an arrangement that gives at least two of the three parties involved a good incentive to obscure prices, so that the consumer has no idea how good or how rotten a deal he is getting while the insurers and hospitals attempt to game and swindle each other. Given the shocking and terrifying size of serious medical bills--my mother's last stay in the hospital billed out at $360,000 (that's a Ferrari 612 Scaglietti for Doc X plus a BMW 5-Series for one of his brats)--the American health-care consumer, quaking in his paper hospital slippers, no longer even asks: "What does this procedure cost?" He only asks: "Does my insurance cover it?" No prices, no negotiation, no mystical coordination between producer and consumer--instead, maddening and expensive and often underhanded mediation by the insurer.

Medicine is complicated; computers are complicated, too, but you can call Dell or Apple or Best Buy or whomever and ask: "What does this sort of computer cost?" and you will receive an answer. And then, when you get to the store--miracle of miracles!--that will be the price. Computers are damned complicated to make, with programmers in the United States and India collaborating with Taiwanese microchip fabricators, Dutch LED manufacturers, Irish customer-support agents, etc. You can get a price on an iMac, but you can't get a price quote on an ingrown toenail.