SPENDING SoMEBODY ELSE's MONEY
A Wall Street Journal article provides an interesting example of how spending one else's money distorts the decision-making process. A 70-year-old man suffering from a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm was brought to hospital. After several weeks in the intensive care the that goes with it unit with all the modern technology and a three-month stay in the hospital, the bill approached s275,000(none of which would be paid out-of-pocket by the patient).The man's physician determined that his poor eating habits(caused by poorly fitting dentures) were contributing to his slow recovery. He requested that the hospital dentist perform the necessary adjustments. Later, the doctor discovered that the man had not allowed the dentist to adjust the dentures. When asked the reason, the man replied, "$75 is a lot of money It seems that Medicare would not pay for the adjustment, so it would have been an out-of- pocket expenditure for the patient. When you're spending somebody else's money, $275,000 does not seem like a lot of money. But when you are spending your own money, $75 is a lot. Our reliance on a third-party payment system is the major iastitutional feature that contributes to rising costs and increased spending. Cost-conscious consumers have little or no role in a system dominated by third-party payers.