For example, his position on healthcare is to increase subsidies which will drive up demand. Higher demand means higher prices. Does increasing the price of healthcare sound like a good idea to you?
It's a common mistake to think healthcare works like any other sector of the economy, simply following laws of supply and demand. But extensive observations and experience have shown that healthcare is fundamentally different and follows different rules, for all sorts of reasons.
For example, demand in healthcare isn’t like demand for shoes or restaurant meals—it’s driven by need, not wants. People don’t suddenly “shop around for” emergency heart surgeries, repair of skull fractures after a car accident, or cancer treatments just because they’re cheaper. Healthcare needs are unpredictable, often urgent, and largely non-negotiable, which makes demand much less elastic than in typical markets.
Another important difference is that healthcare is already heavily insulated from normal price signals. Most Americans don’t pay the full cost of care out of pocket; insurance—whether private, Medicare, or Medicaid—absorbs most of the bill. The uninsured are the exception, but even they aren’t completely absent from the system. They often use emergency rooms or rely on charity care, which is more expensive and less efficient. Subsidizing access mainly shifts them into cheaper, preventive, and more regular channels of care rather than generating brand new demand. In that sense, the effect of subsidies is less about driving up prices and more about reallocating care to where it’s more cost-effective.
Healthcare supply is also not entirely fixed. It’s true that training more doctors takes years, but health systems can expand access in other ways—adding nurse practitioners, opening urgent care clinics, investing in telemedicine, or adopting technologies that make treatment more efficient. Unlike a finite resource such as land, medicine can respond to higher demand by finding new ways to deliver care. At the same time, covering the uninsured tends to change
what care gets delivered: instead of expensive ER visits and late-stage treatments, people are more likely to get preventive screenings, chronic disease management, and early interventions. That shift raises costs upfront but often saves money in the long run, since managing hypertension or diabetes early is cheaper than treating a stroke or kidney failure later.
Healthcare also comes with unique market failures that make it unlike other goods. Patients can’t easily judge the necessity or quality of a surgery or medication, which means doctors act as intermediaries in deciding what gets consumed. Public health adds another wrinkle: when more people are vaccinated or treated for communicable diseases, everyone benefits, insured or not. And there’s a broader social dimension as well—access to healthcare supports workforce participation, stability, and life expectancy, increasing public health and increasing economic productivity- making it a public good as much as a private one.
So will Maryland’s plan to subsidize care for the uninsured raise costs? In the short term, probably yes, because unmet needs will surface once people can actually afford to see a doctor. But in the medium and long run, costs may stabilize or even fall relative to the status quo, since preventive care replaces more expensive emergency interventions. And unlike in normal markets, prices themselves are largely set administratively—through Medicare and Medicaid fee schedules or negotiated insurance contracts—so the classic fear of runaway inflation from “increased demand” doesn’t really apply.
All this is not just hypothesis or opinion. There is actually extensive observation and experience to back it up- both domestically and abroad. In the US, for example, the case study of Massachussetts under Mitt Romney was actually the first national model of implementing this program, with dramatically positive results. More recently, Thailand implemented a universal healthcare plan, also with dramatically positive results.
(see next post for links to real world outcomes and experiences with implementing these ideas)
