John Goodman has an excellent post today on “Value Purchasing” in which he deals with the issue of “dumb payment systems.” In the comments, his health economist colleague, Devon Herrick, points to a striking divergence. Herrick looked at rates of increase of prices and found that the price of cosmetic surgery, one of the few medical procedures which is almost entirely paid for by the people getting it, increased at less than one third the rate for medical care in general. Check out the graph.