Free Market Medicine
The “bodega clinicas” that line the bustling commercial streets of immigrant neighborhoods around Los Angeles are wedged between money order kiosks and pawnshops. These storefront offices, staffed with Spanish-speaking medical providers, treat ailments for cash: a doctor’s visit is $20 to $40; a cardiology exam is $120; and at one bustling clinic, a colonoscopy is advertised on an erasable board for $700…Such all-hours access and upfront pricing are critical, Latino health experts say, to a population that often works around the clock for low wages.
Entire post by Sarah Varney in the NYT.
Article says that most of them aren’t regulated like normal clinics. That’s kind of scary.
To bad they don’t have a drive-through.
Regulating these clinics would only raise the costs of doing business which would be passed on the consumers making the cost of the healthcare they need restrictive, even if it is safer. It would be interesting to see an empirical study on the effectiveness and accuaracy of such bodegas clinicas.
I think it’s not so much about how cheap their services are (which can be concerning to many of us, since you usually “get what you pay for”)…but it’s more about how poor their image as a health provider seems to be. How much can their patients really trust these “clinics” if they represent themselves so poorly?
Regardless of the parameters mentioned, such as safety, it’s the transparency that’s key to the entire cost issue.
I am not sure the only solution is to promote a competitive environment and provide low-cost treatment that may in some cases kill the patient instead of saving the patient. Competition is good but I think it becomes only one component of a multi-facited problem in our complex society. At some point, some sort of societal intervention for malpractice would inherently be enacted, I think.
This is fascinating indeed, yet another case why we should have free market in health care, one where these isn’t any 3rd party muddling up the pricing and stifling necessary competition.