What Alicorn said—most people aren’t going to overuse free medical care, at least not through that vector.
The basics of economics are not suspended for medicine. “Overuse” is a judgment and therefore not useful for a dispassionate discussion, but people do commonly buy more (notice I say “more”, which is not a judgment) of something when it costs less. I do this all the time when shopping for food. Of there is a sale on a good brand of sardines, I might buy twenty cans at once (and I’ll go through them pretty fast too).
Now of course, if something is sufficiently inexpensive then a long queue will likely form, and once the queue is formed then that will limit consumption of the service or good, but does not bring the consumption back down to the original level. Consumption levels off but probably at a higher level.
But key point: don’t use judgment terms like overuse unless you want to kill your mind. Did I buy “too much” sardines? Well, maybe I completely cleared out the shelf, or maybe I took half and some other person took the other half, leaving no sardines for anyone else. Who is to judge that I took “too much”? But we can describe what happened without passing judgment: at the sale price, the sardines were quickly cleared out, leaving no sardines for any further customers. That’s a shortage. Lowering the price below the market level may create a shortage—which is not a judgment, it is a description of what happens. Alternatively, lowering the price may create a queue. Offloading the price to a third party may, rather than creating a shortage or queue, lead to increased use and thus an increase in price. And so on. Immediately jumping in with judgment words like overuse triggers the emotions and makes thought difficult.
You’re right, I did use the wrong term there, and in a way that encourages sloppy thinking. I was just trying to dispel the vision some people have of the population being ultra price-sensitive to doctor visit payments and are therefore just inches away from overloading the system this way if it became free, which I think is a common but unrealistic model of the dynamics of health care decisions, in particular the non-monetary costs of doctor visits.
And since you bring up the topic, the health care sector is many, many degrees removed from market-based identification of efficient production/consumption levels, in some ways intractably (because of public unwillingness to let people go without certain kinds of care on the basis of not affording it, for example).
The basics of economics are not suspended for medicine. “Overuse” is a judgment and therefore not useful for a dispassionate discussion, but people do commonly buy more (notice I say “more”, which is not a judgment) of something when it costs less. I do this all the time when shopping for food. Of there is a sale on a good brand of sardines, I might buy twenty cans at once (and I’ll go through them pretty fast too).
Now of course, if something is sufficiently inexpensive then a long queue will likely form, and once the queue is formed then that will limit consumption of the service or good, but does not bring the consumption back down to the original level. Consumption levels off but probably at a higher level.
But key point: don’t use judgment terms like overuse unless you want to kill your mind. Did I buy “too much” sardines? Well, maybe I completely cleared out the shelf, or maybe I took half and some other person took the other half, leaving no sardines for anyone else. Who is to judge that I took “too much”? But we can describe what happened without passing judgment: at the sale price, the sardines were quickly cleared out, leaving no sardines for any further customers. That’s a shortage. Lowering the price below the market level may create a shortage—which is not a judgment, it is a description of what happens. Alternatively, lowering the price may create a queue. Offloading the price to a third party may, rather than creating a shortage or queue, lead to increased use and thus an increase in price. And so on. Immediately jumping in with judgment words like overuse triggers the emotions and makes thought difficult.
You’re right, I did use the wrong term there, and in a way that encourages sloppy thinking. I was just trying to dispel the vision some people have of the population being ultra price-sensitive to doctor visit payments and are therefore just inches away from overloading the system this way if it became free, which I think is a common but unrealistic model of the dynamics of health care decisions, in particular the non-monetary costs of doctor visits.
And since you bring up the topic, the health care sector is many, many degrees removed from market-based identification of efficient production/consumption levels, in some ways intractably (because of public unwillingness to let people go without certain kinds of care on the basis of not affording it, for example).