I’ve decided there are two types of buyers of health care in the United States. There are those who care what health care costs and there are those who don’t. Ask the average person how much they pay for their gallbladder surgery. They’ll likely scratch their head and not know or they’ll say they paid their deductible plus 20% up to the maximum of $1,000.

People typically don’t know and when they don’t know, they really don’t care. All they care about is what their deductible and co-pay were. There are some people that don’t care at all and those are the folks with very low deductibles and very low co-pays for their insurance.

Then there are the people who care. The people who care what health care costs are the people who are paying for it themselves. I would make a compelling case that the more people who care what health care costs, the less it will cost. If nobody cares what it costs, it’s very likely going to be more expensive to the extent that third-parties and intermediaries are involved in buying health care, making it more expensive.

By putting our prices online, we have made many friends of people who care what health care costs; the uninsured, Canadians, people from all over the world, the self-funded industry companies that pay for health care out of their company revenue rather than participating in the insurance scam and folks that have very high deductibles and health care savings accounts.

I wanted to point this out and I think in a future blog I’ll talk about the two different types of sellers since we talked about the two different types of buyers in the health care market. Thank you for joining me.