Why can't the market deliver healthcare at a low cost?

Price reduction through competition, the holy cow of the free market lovers and magical solution to every problem. You realize that a truly free market is always going to be anti-competitive? Because in the limit of absolute competition, profits would be 0.

In any case, why don't you address my points in the above post, reasoning why there can be no free market in health care?

 

1) There is no requirement for a car. I can chose to live close to work, so I can walk or bike. Or, I could take public transportation. There are plenty of people who got to work without driving. However, show me just ONE person who never had to use health care in their life?

2) The unwritten policy is the oath of Hippocrates. This is a good policy, because I don't want to see people die on the street because they cannot afford to be treated.

 

Because people want to pay for tv but many don’t want to pay for health insurance. So we end up subsidizing their care. No joke. That’s the reason. Individual mandate all the way. Healthcare is cheaper for everyone when everyone is paying for it.

 

If a man comes into an emergency room, with gunshot wounds to the chest, and he does not have the ability to pay for the care he will receive. Should they just let him die?

 

It isn't a question of what they should do. Its a matter of what they can do. Policies can be changed.

 

I am asking you what you think they should be allowed to do.

 

Good point..............If the same person came in with lung cancer, he would be stabilized and sent home to die.....All part of Reagans plan....Sounds good I guess?

 

You're missing the point. Just because something is perceived as necessary doesn't mean there can't be a free market that provides it.
The majority of people who lived prior to 1900 lived their entire lives with no healthcare and any "healthcare" they did get likely did them more harm than good. It isn't a requirement for the survival of the species and it is entirely amenable to provision as a service in a free market.

What you want or think is good is irrelevant to the question of whether healthcare services can be provided effectively in a free market. Further, there is no reason to think that some providers on the free market wouldn't provide care for the indigent. If what you want and think is good is any indication of popular sentiment there should be more than adequate support for funding healthcare as a charity.

Incidentally, here is what the original hypocratic oath said:

 

Any individual of any profession should be free to provide service or not, as they choose. A doctor should be free to choose whether to treat a person or not for whatever reasons inform his choice. To force him to act as you want him to act is to enslave him to your will.

 

Violent leftists always bring in emergency care when talking about how great govt healthcare is. They never mention routine care because their arguement falls flat. In typical leftist fashion, everything must be an emergency that only the govt can fix.

The way to bring down the cost of health care is a model very similar to car insurance. All routine care comes out of pocket while everyone should carry a high deductible catastrophic care plan to take care of those medical emergencies and chronic care needs like diabetes.

 

So you believe that doctors should be allowed to let mortally injured people die in the street or lobby at will. Got it.

Very compassionate of you.


This is compassionate conservatism on display right here folks. Just let them die! They cheered for it during the debates, and they cheer for it now.

 

One doctors office

One doctor

One RN

One receptionist

A staff of 14 people dealing with billing the insurance companies.

Need surgery ?
Walk into the hospital and inform them you'll be paying cash.
That bill cut by 50% to 60% less.

Pharmaceuticals...
Americans are stuck paying the tab for the R&D for those pharmaceuticals.
People in shithole countries are exempt for paying for the R&D for those drugs.

 

I'll just remind you that there are 2 parts to Obamacare. The public part that allows coverage for anyone no matter if they have preexisting conditions or not, and Medicaid expansion that covers millions of poor people.

 

I guess you can call putting the fox in control of the hen house a gov't problem.
But the whole system is rotten from the inside out.

 

It was nice. You can still buy it.
It no longer makes economic sense for a doctor making 200K a year to drive around the neighborhood treating people making 50K.

 

And please remember Medicaid help millions of elderly when they are dying and broke and in a home because they cant take care of themselves anymore! That is overlooked the most.

 

So you believe that doctors should be forced into servitude against their will. Got it.

Very compassionate of you.

This is the liberal agenda on display right here folks. Enslavement to the State.

I don't believe doctors should be compelled to provide services against their will but that doesn't mean I think they should refuse service to someone in need.

 

Yeah, Same way with Medicare. How would you like to go into your golden years with a serious illness and no insurance. I'm not sure anyone even offers insurance for people 65 and over because they can't compete with Medicare.
I say allow people to buy into Medicare starting at say 55. It's the only way I see to control costs.
Then allow Medicare to negotiate prescriptions like other countries are doing to us. I can see no reason I should be able to buy a drug from Canada cheaper than from my pharmacy.

 

Nobody forces doctors to do anything. They are free to become a car mechanic, if they don't like their profession. In contrast, people go into the profession of medicine on their own will, and they know that they have to swear the Hippocratic oath. In fact, from my teaching of pre-meds, the supply of students who want to go into medicine is almost endless, far more than the medical schools can sustain, which is "socialism" for doctors maintained by the medical college, artificially capping number of seats in medical schools.

 

I believe that they should focus on the purpose of their jobs. Saving peoples lives. Being poor shouldn't be a death sentence like you so cruelly want to make it.

 

Your second video says that when Obamacare was created the cost of healthcare skyrocketed. Sorry about the reality, but healthcare costs were skyrocketing well before Obama took office. So what is the reason that our healthcare is double that of any other developed OECD country yet delivers inferior outcomes? Some of the answers include:

Fee-for-service motivating doctors and facilities to recommend more unnecessary services to increase income.

Malpractice insurance costs increasing instead of finding another means of guarding against malpractice.

Medical equipment manufacturers seeking maximization of profits.

Health insurance companies seeking maximization of profits while having to cover costs of advertising, investment funds to guard against downturns, redundant and extensive claims departments seeking to maximize their bottom line, redundant legal departments, departments for medical advisory comprised of medical professionals, some of the highest profit levels in the nation, etc.

Lack of adequate preventative medicine.

Greedy drug companies charging too much in foreign countries and double in the US what they charge in foreign countries. And drug company costs increased significantly by expensive advertising of prescription drugs (which most other countries have banned. Selection and use of prescription drugs is only permitted by doctors, so why advertise to the public?).

Drug companies commonly "tweek" a prescription drug when the rights to own it approach their end, and then instead of the drug becoming generic, the drug company can market it as a "new drug" with a renewed proprietary period.

Drugs are created not to cure, but to treat and manage symptoms so that the illness continues and the patient keeps having to buy the drug to manage the symptoms.

Redundancy of expensive medical equipment in locales that could be provided and managed by dedicated medical services centers to which doctors send patients for treatment rather than each hospital and/or medical center having their own equipment. But the redundancy is intended to boost prestige in the public eye and promote an increased patient base.

And finally, we cannot get a number on what our actual cost is of patients paying for doctors' visits, treatments, drugs, and actual services and equipment. The only numbers we can get is the total of insurance companies' outlays for operations. And the two are very different as the outlays cover insurance companies' costs of doing business, i.e. "overhead".

Go back and review each of these points with the thought of transitioning to a national healthcare system plus heavy regulation of the rest in mind and you will see that "socialism" will greatly reduce our costs. Even with private healthcare facilities and hospitals and much of what is listed above in place, Medicare's overhead is a fraction of that of private insurance companies.

Think of it this way: Britain is considered to have one of the best medical systems in the world, and their cost is half of ours. So theoretically we could copy their system "verbatim" and then increase expenditures by 50% to make our system the world's best with lowest wait times and our final cost for healthcare in the US would then be 25% less than it is today!

 

What reason demonstrates is that free markets will always deliver that which the government never can.

 

The price of all goods and services, including healthcare-related ones, are dictated by supply and demand. Government policies drive up the price of healthcare by constraining supplies with excessive taxes and regulations. It's painfully obvious that this is the case. The few sectors of the economy that are lightly taxed and regulated, like electronics, are characterized by rapid innovation that continuously drives prices down and quality up. The pace at which innovation occurs under genuine free market conditions is astonishing. Unfortunately, the US healthcare sector is very far away from being a genuine free market. Indeed, this sector of the economy is one of the most heavily taxed and regulated. And it shows in the extremely high prices, the lack of meaningful innovation, and the increasing corporatization of medicine.

 

If "corporate greed" prevented markets from delivering affordable goods and services, then why are electronics so affordable? The tech companies are just as "greedy" as the next company, yet they provide high quality goods and services at extremely low prices. In many cases, tech companies provide very valuable services essentially for free: Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc. I've managed to save myself thousands of dollars in repair costs just from watching videos on YouTube, yet I paid YouTube nothing. How do you explain that?

 

Where did I say I want to make poverty a death sentence? All I've advocated is freedom for the doctors you would enslave. Who says a doctor's purpose is to save lives? A lot of things doctors do isn't related to any sort of life saving and their purpose in becoming doctors may be merely to earn a living. Saving lives for some doctors may just be a bi-product of their true purpose, to get rich.