Is Horacio Ramirez the reason health care can’t get fixed?

There’s a parallel between the health care debate and the Royals, and it has nothing to do with boos and hisses.

James Surowiecki, who writes about business and finance at The New Yorker, posits that resistance to the Democrats’ ideas for reforming health care has a psychological component. The skittishness, Surowiecki explains, is partly a reflection of biases that make people resistance to change.

“Most of us, for instance, are prey to the so-called ‘endowment effect’: the mere fact that you own something leads you to overvalue it,” Surowiecki writes.

A simple demonstration of this was an experiment in which some students in a class were given coffee mugs emblazoned with their school’s logo and asked how much they would demand to sell them, while others in the class were asked how much they would pay to buy them. Instead of valuing the mugs similarly, the new owners of the mugs demanded more than twice as much as the buyers were willing to pay.

The endowment effect, the thinking follows, causes us to want to hold on to the current system of health delivery even as we say we want change. 

Royals G.M. Dayton Moore also seems captive to the endowment effect.