Hard reality: a thing is worth exactly what another is willing to pay for it.
"Pay $X or you'll die" isn't about willingness.
But people aren't buying this kind of medical care voluntarily, and that throws a lot of capitalist idealism out the window.
In fact, there are a lot of reasons why normal supply and demand aren't quite applicable for medical care.
Imagine a person having an accident that injures them and knocks them unconscious. They don't pick the ambulance service, they don't pick the hospital they go to, they don't pick which doctors work on them, etc. But they still get the bill for all of it.
The subject of the article most certainly did choose M.D. Anderson voluntarily. That hospital is famous as a spare-no-expense luxury resort institution. They could certainly have gone an oncologist in any large city and got treatment that was nearly as good.
However, there are parts of it that can be. (And even for the instances where you really have no choice, price visibility could still provide some cost containment.)
And some services --like health-- are so crucial for the community and human dignity that they shouldn't even be left unregulated outside mass democractic control in the first place.
The same way we don't let the "market decide" what drugs are OK to be sold (e.g by letting the people "freely" choose to buy some experimental or dangerous snake-oil stuff).
But most other OECD countries haven't confused "paying for insurance" with "paying for healthcare", either.
And if left to the "the market should be totally free / now give the banks a state bailout and use the state military to ensure we get cheap resources from abroad" proponents that's exactly what would happen.
Nope, didn't add to the argument at all...
How about "we should all be treated fairly/you have to pay for MY military"? Is that fair?
Why is a socialized military fair when a socialized healthcare system would not be?
I'm for: "you have to pay to build a sustainable health care system that encompasses the whole of society, including YOUR health care, and I don't care if you are a rich prick who doesn't care about others".
No, I'm for democracy with the full original meaning of the word (as in ancient Athens), which includes a full list of obligations from each and every citizen to his city-state and all of his fellow citizens.
The word for individual that didn't want to contribute to their state, in ancient Athens, was "idiot" (literally: private), and it meant both the "private citizen" (a citizen involved only in his private affairs) and the imbecile.
That's where we got the word "idiot" from, and I find it very appropriate.
>I get it - slavery is back in style, because that's what it is when you take from one person to give to another, no matter what the relative positions of the two persons are.
No, it very much matters what the relative positions of the two persons are. It makes all the difference in the world.
For example, the rich slave owners in the South should not just have their slaves freed. They should also have had to share their estate between their slaves (the very persons that were the unpaid source of his wealth until then). That way we wouldn't have to wait until 1950 to end segregation, nor we would have the problem of piss poor black families going forward (and the crime that goes with that), or Jim Crow laws.
How about putting a gun to the doctors forehead and demanding free treatment for my loved one? Oh wait, there is a state and there are laws, we're not exactly a Wild, Wild West. Some laws regulate certain things, medical care can be one of them
Harder reality: I'm willing to pay precisely zero dollars American for the military.