No. of Recommendations: 2
It depends what is being given a price.
Big difference between drugs and personal professional services.
Sure, but when I said "pricing can't meaningfully affect medical spending" I was referring to changes in pricing systems. Pricing for medical services is very opaque (sometimes completely invisible) to patients at point of purchase decision, and patients don't have way of knowing what they're buying in advance. Pricing for drugs already isn't like that - today patients can get a very good sense for what a drug will cost (and what you get for the price).
The kind of price controls you're describing are exactly how other nations save money on health care expenditures. They impose price controls on health care, and tell providers (whether they be providing services or drugs or equipment) that they're going to have to eat smaller reimbursement rates.
Prescription drugs are "only" about 10% of total U.S. health care expenditures (about $485B). That's not nothing - certainly more than the amount that goes to insurance company profits - but it does mean that you're only looking at a few percentage points of health care expenditures that can be obtained by squeezing on drug prices. To actually get U.S. health care costs close to other western developed countries, you need to squeeze compensation/reimbursement on everything.
Even then, though, note that we haven't squeezed drug prices all that much. It's just really hard to do - our system is structured so that it is very difficult to impose large costs on a small discrete group in exchange for small benefits shared by a very large diffuse group.
