Most doctors' hackles would rise if I told them that our goal should be to make medical care a commodity, but this is in everyone's best interest. The conventional point of view is that medical care rests on a personal interaction between the doctor and the patient, and it depends on the chemistry and the relationship between the two. Because this is not something which can be objectively measured or quantified, it's best left to the two of them in the privacy of the clinic. While this works well when you have good doctors and good patients, it also means that there's a lack of transparency, and unscrupulous doctors can take undue advantage of their patients' helplessness.
Everyone suffers when this happens because the entire medical profession gets a bad reputation. Because of the information asymmetry, this is a marketplace where the odds are stacked against the poor patient. For…
