Healthcare is consumer product. That is not the issue. The issues are:
- information asymmetry & credence good
- negative selection
- lack of standards
- lack of oversight
I don't get why he's being downvoted - although maybe too general of a statement, I can completely see how new development in an area could actually drive rent prices up - development also affects demand - from gentrification to things like opening business and infrastructure scaling making the area more attractive.
I've seen this happen in my city - there's a really renowned developer building high quality mixed residential-buisiness complexes - as soon as they started building a new site the surrounding prices went up, this happened in all of their projects I've looked into.
But they are the most extreme example. I'd guess that most of the neighborhoods that are seeing active development are increasing prices faster than the rest of the market.
This is a complex issue. if you add apartments for the same number of citizens prizes should go down, but that's hardly the nature of the system we are working with here.
If you have a busy highway and add more lanes will traffic jams go down?
But this can happen with certain products, including housing, by driving new demand. Imagine your street has a great fruit store that caters to locals and is a bit busy but reasonably priced.
Three other fruit stores see the demand and open up, offering slightly different fruit and other higher margin products like pies and smoothies. People start coming from all over the city for fruit, and tourists come to try local fruit they can't get at home.
Now you have four busy fruit stores, and they gradually raise prices and focus on higher margin items instead of everyday fruits and veg.
This happens all the time with bars and restaurants, too, as a neighborhood gets trendy. And it can happen with housing, because upscale housing brings rich people to the neighborhood, which makes other rich people feel more at home, even in less fancy housing.
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Mineralisation of tooth is a constant process with a tug-of-war between pathogenic and protective factors [3:09].
If it's in the balance, of the remineralisation factors prevail, you can stop the progress of the cavity. But deeper the cavity, this is harder to achieve.
> optimize for revenue. I think it's nonsense and even dangerous.
As with everything, there are caveats to the kind of doctor you are talking. The key distinction is that most dentists keep the residual income: the difference between the fixed costs and income. It can be a quite large sum and high % of dentists' earnings. So a dentist has a very strong incentive to increase it. Overtreating patients is the easiest way to do it since increasing the prices is not an option due to competition.
Who isn't keeping the residual income? It's the doctors who work only for a fixed salary. They can't earn more by overtreating. In fact, if they have less work, they are at profit since their salary is fixed. They don't care about increasing the residual income since they don't get it.
We just started doing tests with couple dozen patients for my startup that provides multiple independent dental opinions. It turned out that 80% of people have bruxism.
Yes, we only had less than 20 people so far, so this statistic will likely change. But what was worrying is that they had no clue. Even despite having tooth wear in a very advanced stage.
