Marty Makary on the Price We Pay

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 10 February 2020

⏱️ 80 minutes

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Summary

Physician and author Marty Makary of Johns Hopkins University talks about his book The Price We Pay with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Makary highlights some of the stranger aspects of our current health care system including the encouragement of unnecessary or even harmful procedures and the predatory behavior of some hospitals who sue patients and garnish their wages to recover fees that are secret until after the procedure is completed. Makary favors requiring hospitals to make their prices transparent. He also discusses a number of ways that employers and patients are trying to avoid the worst aspects of the current system.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:08.0	I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
0:12.0	Our website is econtalk.org, where you can subscribe, comment on this podcast,
0:17.0	and find links and other information related to today's conversation.
0:21.0	We'll also find our archives where you can listen to every episode we've ever done going back to 2006.
0:27.0	Our email address is mailadycontalk.org. We'd love to hear from you.
0:33.0	Today is December 13th, 2019.
0:35.0	My guest is Dr. and author Marty McCary.
0:38.0	He is professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine,
0:41.0	professor of health policy and management at Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health,
0:46.0	and he is the author of The Price We Pay, What Broke American Healthcare,
0:51.0	and How to Fix It, which is our topic for today's conversation.
0:54.0	Marty, welcome to econtalk.
0:56.0	Great to be with you, Russ.
0:58.0	So let's start with a problem that I think is underappreciated.
1:03.0	I think a lot of people are in the impression that medical care is an economics jargon,
1:08.0	is there's an inelastic demand, meaning you just have to have it,
1:12.0	no matter what the price. You'll pay anything.
1:14.0	So we can't ever have prices for medical care.
1:17.0	And your book opens with an example of a phenomenon we've been talking about quite a bit on the program
1:22.0	sometimes more information is not always better.
1:26.0	In particular, medical screening often has consequences that people underestimate,
	...

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