US cities pay too much for buses

"Federal funding typically covers 80% of bus purchases, with agencies responsible for the remainder."

Well, there is your answer. The one making the purchase isn't the one primarily paying for the purchase. This makes them less sensitive to pricing.

Kinda like how expensive healthcare is since it is paid for by insurance.

Or how you don't care how much you put on your plate or what you choose to eat at an all you can eat buffet.

The second you detach the consumer from the price of something, even through an intermediary such as health insurance, that is when they stop caring about how much something costs, and so the price jumps.

    > The second you detach the consumer from the
    > price of something, even through an
    > intermediary such as health insurance, that
    > is when they stop caring about how much
    > something costs, and so the price jumps.

In reality, this claim doesn't survive a cursory glance at the OECD's numbers for health expenditure per capita[1].

You'll find that (even ignoring the outlier that is the US health care system) that in some countries where consumers bear at least some of the cost directly via mandatory insurance and deductibles, the spending per capita (and which survives a comparison with overall life expectancy etc.) is higher than in some countries where the consumer is even further detached from spending, via single-payer universal healthcare systems.

Or, the other way around, it's almost like it's a very complex issue that resists reducing the problem to an Econ 101 parable.

1. https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2023/11/health-at-a-gla...

If consumers actually directly paid the whole cost for health services (as opposed to a fixed price, like a $20 copay, etc.), the prices charged would become far more regular.

An easy way to examine this is to compare the price of over-the-counter versus pharmaceuticals. If a third party weren't paying for them, the price would have to either come down to something affordable to the average person, or else the market for it would shrink to only the wealthy.