Who really pays for health care

Via @nprnews: Who Really Pays For Health Care Might Surprise You  http://n.pr/1rEYxu0

I got this article in my daily news feeds and thought I would share my thoughts on this. I met with a local union organization yesterday about some political endorsing and they asked me why healthcare costs keep going up. I think I said it well, but not sure if they got it. The key is transparency. The article clearly shows that there are many hands paying the bills. We think it's us through insurance premiums and deductibles, but in reality someone else is subsidizing it.
This year has been a big eye opener for a lot of people who saw larger increases in insurance premiums. For a lot, these costs have never been budgeted for before and making that premium payment is a huge burden on their finances. I would bet that if more people had to allocate larger portions of their income to pay for healthcare they would figure out very quickly how to decrease that so they can enjoy the better things in life. When we get subsidized, we have a false sense of what costs are really there and we consume disproportionately. The reason money exists is because the world truly has limited resources and money keeps those resources in check so we don't over consume. We love consuming and could easily overdue it.
There is a concept in economics called the 'Tragedy of the commons" which relates perfectly to anything we have. Imagine wanting to get to work at 8:00am on a Monday morning on the freeway. There is plenty of road space available for one car to drive down and easily drive 65 MPH. The problem is there is also thousands of people wanting to get to their destinations at the exact same time. Thus we get traffic jams and only get to move at a snails pace. We have this limited resource- freeway room, and we have many people trying to use it. If this was a business, someone would realize there is an opportunity to open up a new freeway and take some of that excess capacity, but because roads are publicly funded and heavily subsidized, that additional road might not happen for many years and people just have to adjust. Some drivers might take different routes and find more efficient routes, but others will still keep driving the crowded freeway. It gets even worse when that traffic is sporadic, because you don't take that route very often or get on the freeway at that time normally.
Imagine if you knew every morning what the traffic would be like? If you knew the cost of going to work would be before you got on? Your chances of taking that alternate route might increase, especially if it's a time or place you don't normally travel. Health care is similar to that road most people don't normally deal with. When they do get on the road, they find it super costly and have no clue where to go and get stuck in traffic. If only they knew what was coming before they got on, the decisions leading up to there would have been changed drastically. Since they were paying for the road ahead of time through insurance premiums (or so we hope) they might treat the road with a little more respect and understand what kind of blood and sweat went into it as well. Since they truly had no clue, they really don't care and expect it to pay for them 100% along the way.
Transparency and open reporting of costs, placing financial responsibility on individuals, and shedding light on our financial lives will make things much better for all of us.