First Free-Market Hospital: The Surgery Center of Oklahoma

Perhaps the only free market hospital is in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. The Surgery Center of Oklahoma performs all different types of surgeries ranging from ear, nose, throat, general surgery, urology, ophthalmology, and various orthopedic surgeries. What is different about The Surgery Center is Oklahoma is that they don’t go through insurance companies. Let me repeat this no insurance is involved in these procedures. What is even more interesting is that the prices for all surgeries are included on the website.  By doing this the surgery center is able to not have to deal with the bureaucracy of insurance companies and able to actually charge less because of the bureaucracy. The surgery center also has an infection rate of only .3% in 2006, .04% by 2008, and in 2010 only .001% which is a fraction of the national average of 2.6% per year.

I am always curious why finding outcomes of hospitals is so hard to find. For anyone with insurance they really don’t care what the cost of a procedure is because usually there is a price ceiling on what they pay in any given year. This would be the same thing as going to the grocery store with no prices loading up on whatever you desired an then paying a fixed amount every time you visited the store (think co-pay). In this scenario, there is no incentive to care about what the cost of anything is or its benefits. Health care works the same way. We need a single-payer system of people paying out of their own pockets. A common complaint to this might be that “People can’t pay out of their own pockets because prices are too high!” People fail to realize the reason why prices are high. If the American Medical Association got rid of their cartel and let more people practice medicine, the FDA allowed patients to take drugs after they passed Phase I of clinical trials, and if prescription drugs available without prescriptions the price of health care would drop faster than you could say abracadabra. All of the things I mentioned artificially increase the price of medicine. Also getting rid of the employer deduction for health insurance and allowing individuals to decide would help. Another thing that would help is allowing people to buy health insurance in different states. Why it is illegal to buy health insurance in different state is beyond me.

The United States needs more hospitals like The Surgery Center of Oklahoma. When people have to pay with their own money they pay much closer to attention to the costs and benefits. Setting up a hospital is no easy feat due to the massive amount of regulations required to start one. I would prefer to lower to barriers to entry and allow anyone open a hospital. We want hospitals popping up like McDonalds and Wal-Marts. It would be positive to have more for profit hospitals. People might say “Well for profit hospitals have no incentive to make people better”. Organizations and businesses have reputations. If a hospital was known to make people worse no one would go there putting the hospital out of business. More for-profit hospitals would cure our quasi private/public health system.