I could see it going either way.
With free access, people would be more inclined to go to the doctor for simple and small things, but in return would probably catch more serious issues early and have better access to treatment, therefor reducing the need for intensive and specialized healthcare.
Without, people avoid going to the doctor for small stuff, but end up having to go in with more complicated issues later on.
Gotta love when people who don’t work in my industry try to explain my industry to me lol.
This is just about the grossest oversimplification I’ve ever read. The HMO act isn’t even close to the worst offender of laws that inflate our costs
I’ve worked in healthtech and biotech for nearly a decade at this point. I have a nuanced understanding of the by-design inefficiencies inherent to the American healthcare and insurance system on a bureaucratic and technical level.
There are of course teams of heinous legislation that enabled this shitshow to evolve into what it is today, but the HMO act definitely was a primary initial driver for bootstrapping the system that we have today. I don’t mean to be reductive, but I do mean to zero in on initialization and inflection points, and that was a pretty damn big one.