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Originally Posted by Daybreaker
I think you would have to be more foolishly optimistic to think that a private company would care what happens to you. And the existence a government program doesn't mean that private health care is outlawed, whereas a private system benefits greatly from not having a government system to compete with.
And that's really what this is about -- private industry doesn't want to have to compete with the government. They don't want to have to live up to government standards. It should be easy, right? Then what are they afraid of? Right now, they're profiting by selling rope in a land where they've bought and removed all the safety nets.
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Cool analogy.
But I never said that private companies would care about you. You sign a contract with them where the promise to provide you with certain benefits in a certain situation, in exchange for monthly payments. When they violate that contract, you can sue them, and that is why they care about upholding their end of the contract and taking care of you. When the government violates its contract, there really isn't anything that you can do to fix the problem.
Private companies fundamentally wouldn't be able to compete with a government agency selling health insurance if that government agency was funded by tax dollars. The government would simply take all the business away because people would already be forced to pay for part of the insurance that they would get from the government. If a government program could run revenue positive, then it would be perfectly acceptable. However, that government agency would need to need to make about the same amount of profit as the private companies in order to maintain itself, therefore defeating the purpose of a government agency.
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You don't have to keep all of your consumers. And all of the companies know this and it's much, much easier for them to collaborate and set their own prices than it is for individual people to do the same. Why should only private companies be allowed to organize to influence the market?
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You want to know why they can't collaborate and set prices?
IT'S ILLEGAL
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But competition only works that way in textbooks. In the real world, companies collaborate. They don't compete. They lose money by competing and they gain money by organizing with each other to dictate the market, and if any little company doesn't want to play along it's pretty easy for a big company to crush a little company. So what do you think they're going to do? I don't see a lot of CEOs walking around with the minimum amount of pocket change.
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That's a monopoly,
IT'S ILLEGAL