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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Is it obvious? I went to a fancy Japanese dinner last night. It was, obviously, a for-profit venture. At any point during that dinner, was anyone in the restaurant worried about the restaurant putting its "profits" above its patrons?

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They weren't worried about it, but it was happening anyway.

I doubt the restaurant was a monopoly with literal powers of life, death, and bankruptcy over its patrons.

Why do other life-or-death markets --- the markets for food, say, or for housing and clothing --- manage to function effectively as markets? Why do we give section 8 vouchers to people to afford private housing instead of continuing to build housing projects, and SNAP benefits instead of government cheese? If anything, those other markets are more critical to life and death than health care, which is needed situationally.

Because message boards are a fertile breeding ground for fundamental attribution fallacies, I'll lay my cards on the table here and point out that I'm an activist Democrat and health care is, after public schools (which I am not in favor of privatizing), one of my most important motivating policy concerns. My problem isn't that I think conservatives are right about health insurance; it's that the countervailing arguments don't cohere.

Your argument is that a nonprofit Japanese restaurant could have delivered a better experience to me?

I'd wager a nonprofit Japanese restaurant could have provided your meal at a lower cost.

How? Why doesn't anyone open a nonprofit restaurant and outcompete the for-profit ones?

Clearly, because profit-seeking infiltrators would sneak in and corrupt the whole affair.

Would it have been the same meal, cooked by people with the same level of talent, served with the same care? "Profit" is not just a disposable line item.

No, my argument is that "putting profits before customers" is a nonsensical thing to worry about.

This is pretty much the same argument that you make sidethread.

Greedy insurers don’t pay your restaurant bill and thus do not control the quality of service (by squeezing restaurant owners for every penny they can save)

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