> a truly free market health care system would be substantially cheaper
Why would you imagine that?
Regardless... You must also then ask the question, whether a "truly free market health care system" would be ethical.
Why would you imagine that?
Regardless... You must also then ask the question, whether a "truly free market health care system" would be ethical.
Why do you imagine it wouldn't!? The portions of health care universally not covered by insurance are not subject to the same cost disease of the industry as a whole. Lo and behold, the real cost of eg. breast augmentation is declining (total cost of about 4K)! The cost of lasik has decreased ~50% over the last 15 years, current results are better, and the surgery has the highest rating of patient satisfaction in the entire industry! A similar result anywhere else in medicine in the US is completely unimaginable.
> Regardless... You must also then ask the question, whether a "truly free market health care system" would be ethical.
Nonsense. The important question is: 'would a "truly free market health care system" be more ethical than the current system'.
In addition to not being covered by insurance those procedures are all elective. For elective procedures a free market is more likely to produce better results.
There is no way to make money insuring or treating poor, sick patients. The free market just can't do it.
The inherent problem here is that the math behind traditional free market economics breaks down when it comes to life saving goods and services. There is no equilibrium to be had, because of a combination of issues.
First the answer to how much will you pay to access this live saving drug is "anything" for 99% of the population. Second, life saving services are time sensitive--customers often can't choose a different supplier except the closest one. Third patent law ensures that there often isn't an alternative supplier.
> Nonsense. The important question is: 'would a "truly free market health care system" be more ethical than the current system'.
If you want to be overly semantic, which you clearly do, that's actually not "the important question" since it actually tells you less than my original question. You care about "a truly free market health care system's" relative ethicality not just in relation to the current system, but also in relation to (all) other potential alternative health care system (like a single payer system)...
Dental work is only semi-elective, and prices are driven down thanks to transparent pricing.
Likewise, one can argue that vision services are also non-elective (e.g. people need to see), and prices go through a very large range.
Many medical conditions are not "emergencies". And even so, I often get referrals from my doctor to external imaging services. If those prices were transparent, I imagine a downwards pressure on prices would happen quite quickly.
To give an example, ultrasounds for pregnancies cost ~$250, ultrasounds for almost anything else are 50% to 100% higher in price. In a similar vein, x-rays at the dentist are next to nothing (despite involving a cool robot that rotates around my head, and a digital x-ray sensor that lets me look at images right away!), x-rays for anything else can end up in the hundreds.
Hospitals would also benefit from transparent pricing, if there was a legal mandate that all suppliers be open and honest, prices would drop for everyone. When a hospital sees that other hospitals in the area can offer the same service at a lower cost, meeting the same quality standards, then they can start pushing their vendors to lower prices.
A free market would look something like this:
1) everybody buys their own insurance in a genuinely free marketplace (this is ENTIRELY not the case now and would probably require significant gov intervention to defeat cartel-seeking behavior from insurance co's. There are good reasons insurance is so highly regulated, only the first of which is that insurance companies are highly incentivized to not pay out since they already have your money, and you can't go elsewhere with your claim.)
2) if you can't pay, you die in the gutter.
It wasn't before, so it probably wouldn't serve as one in the future. The issue is that people aren't very good at estimating risk.
I'm young, healthy, and no one in my family has been in a serious car accident/gotten cancer/had a heart attack in the last 15 years. Obviously that happening is a low risk compared to the financial penalty of maintaining insurance today, so why should I worry? Besides, I'm sure I can get some kind of plan from an insurance company if something bad does happen[1]
[1] I'll be sure to look into the feasibility of this statement as soon as I finish all the other important things on my todo list...
I'm really not a socialist, I promise. I just don't see how you'd do it any other better, and it's pretty clear to me that the results are definitively in for our free market experiment.
It's funny how we all pretty much agree the govt should be in charge of stuff like roads, schools, military, police, fire dept, courts, quite a long list of stuff, but adding anything to that is marketed as creeping socialism.
No. It is simply false. Even a 100% free market does not exclude charity.
Lotta people talk about charity as a replacement for government services, but folks give around 3% of their income to charity (tax deductible) in the US. That ain't gonna get it done. Not even close.
People would have you believe they would give more if they didn't pay as much in taxes, but there is not one shred of evidence that is the case based on variations in local tax rates. And that's a hell of a gap to bridge based on a such a dubious promise.
Occam's razor, and the available evidence, suggests that people would just pocket the difference and the poor can go to hell. They're happy to argue the point until they're blue in the face, but if the past year has taught us nothing at all, it's that people are more than capable of crafting any number of passionate arguments around their self-interest, truth be damned.