It's inefficient and not living to its potential
And many single payer systems around the world only appear to work as well as they do because the US effectively subsidizes medical costs through its own out of control prices.
If we could get healthcare to that level, it would be great.
For a less extreme example: Wal-Mart and Amazon have made plenty of people very rich, and they charge customers for their goods; but their entrance into the markets have arguable brought down prices.
> It should be a regulated utility like electricity or railroads, we should have a public alternative like the post office is to UPS, or it should be nationalized.
I agree that electricity and railroads should be regulated like Google Search.
It's really weird that snail mail in the US is a government monopoly. When even social democratic Germany managed to privatise them.
> The situation gets more dire when you consider their browser monopoly.
Don't a lot of people in the US use iPhones? They don't ship with Chrome as the default browser, do they?
(And yes, Safari is built on top of the same open source engine as Chrome. But you can hardly call using the same open source project a 'monopoly'. Literally anyone can fork it.)
There's also plenty of other browsers available.
A public mail service is required by our constitution. It's cheaper than the private options and often the only option for many rural areas. It's not a monopoly.
Where does it say so in your constitution? All I can find is the postal clause which Wikipedia summarises as follows, but whose full text isn't much longer:
> Article I, Section 8, Clause 7, of the United States Constitution, the Postal Clause, authorizes the establishment of "post offices and post roads"[1] by the country's legislature, the Congress.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_Clause
The Postal Clause certainly allows the government to run a public postal service, but I don't see how the constitution _requires_ it. It doesn't even require the federal government to regulate postal services, it merely allows it.
Perhaps I missed something?
> It's cheaper than the private options and often the only option for many rural areas.
If you want to subsidise rural areas, I would suggest to do so openly, transparently and from general taxation. At least general taxation is progressive etc. Instead of just making urban folks pay more for their mail, whether they be rich or poor.
I would also suggest only subsidising poor rural areas. Rich rural areas don't need our help.
> It's not a monopoly.
Compare and contrast what USPS has to say https://about.usps.com/universal-postal-service/universal-se...
And why do customers come back to shop there?
Customers continue shopping there because human beings are typically incapable of accepting a short-term loss (higher price) for a long-term gain (product lasts more than three uses).
That's a weird metric. If tomorrow Wal-Mart laid off all employees and replaced them with robots, they would surely be worse off, but by your metric Wal-Mart would look less evil?
> Customers continue shopping there because human beings are typically incapable of accepting a short-term loss (higher price) for a long-term gain (product lasts more than three uses).
Groceries typically only last one use.
Likewise, I would not use my flippant 3 times metric regarding durability to cover the quality of produce.
You have to look at the counterfactual of what these people would do, if Wal-Mart weren't around. You seem to implicitly assume that they'd be getting higher paying jobs somewhere else (so they wouldn't have to rely on welfare)? If so, what's stopping those people from switching to these better jobs right now, even while Wal-Mart is still around?
And sure, let's disregard how many times you can eat your groceries. That was a cheap shot. However I think quality vs price trade-off is something customers have to make for themselves anyway. Who am I to judge their choices?
Google searches cost many billions of dollars: your confusion is because the customer isn’t the person searching but the advertisers paying to influence them. Healthcare can’t work like that not just because the real costs are both much higher and resistant to economies of scale but, critically, there aren’t people with deep pockets lining up to pay for you to be healthy. That’s why every other developed country sees better results for less money: keeping people healthy is a social good, and political forces work for that better than raw economic incentives.
Yeah, because we saw what a great job the tech bros did making government more efficient.