More than anything else, what the government provides is organization. If everything is privatized, people will fall through the cracks -- most notably, those who can't pay and don't have anyone else to pay for them. That's a lot of people. Millions may be a conservative estimate.

If you partially privatize it, where you have the government pay a private company to do something, you can get either the best or worst results, I think. It all comes down to the fine print in the contract. If the fine print requires the private company to give the best care possible to the most people possible, and that's what they get paid for, then I think everything will go swimmingly. However, if the fine print (and I'm really talking about legislation and regulation here) is such that this private company will make more money by making sure that enough people are screwed over to make the rest happy to pay more -- if you charge people so much that half of the people can't or won't pay, that's still profitable if you've tripled or quadrupled the rates. See what I saying?

Some things are more important than profit. Yes, we need profit in order to keep all the little economic engines running, but everything doesn't have to be optimized for maximum profit at all times in every facet of human existence. Health care is pretty high up there on that list.

Don't think what you're saying hasn't occurred to me. But I just can't bring myself to see a whole bunch of human death as a positive thing. I like humans. They make me laugh.

People fall through the cracks in a government system as well. The only difference is that when you fall through the cracks in a system run by the government, there is no one that you can turn to to help you. In a private system, you can always go to another company for healthcare, and when a company violates an agreement, you can sue them. You can't do that when the government runs everything, and you'd have to be foolishly optimistic to think that the government would care if something wrong happened to you.

You can't just triple or quadruple rates and keep your consumers. What would happen would be that another company would use lower rates to make money off of the part of the market that you were abandoning. Then your own customers who were willing to pay triple or quadruple rates would go over to them and you would be left with no customers.

"Maximum profit" in a free market if usually the minimum amount of profit that it takes to pay of monthly costs, to pay of the original cost of investing, and to provide funds for expansion. If a company made more than what it had to, then another company could come in and charge what it had to and steal the other companies business. Competition would drive the price down to the market price and profit to the minimum amount necessary.

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"It is extremely difficult for our contemporaries to conceive of the conditions of free banking because they take government interference with banking for granted and as necessary"

-- Ludwig von Mises

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.

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?

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.

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.

You want to know why they can't collaborate and set prices?

IT'S ILLEGAL

That's a monopoly,

IT'S ILLEGAL

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"It is extremely difficult for our contemporaries to conceive of the conditions of free banking because they take government interference with banking for granted and as necessary"

-- Ludwig von Mises

Another angle to this issue is that many services could be left up to state and local governments rather than the federal government. I'm not a libertarian or particularly conservative (depending on where you're coming from) but I do believe that the federal government should only be involved in that which can only be accomplished by the federal government and no other entity. Public education, for example, gets worse the more the feds get involved. Even interstate highways could be each state's responsibility with maybe block grants from the feds to help in areas where the local tax base is unable to adequately maintain the roads.

The first President Bush used to talk about 1000 Points of Light, which was the idea that charities and private sources could start doing more of what the federal government has taken on in order to reduce the federal debt. This happens to an extent. An example is a neighbor whose house burned down. Because they make maybe $40K a year they didn't qualify for government assistance, but the Red Cross paid their first month's rent, and a local private shelter paid their deposit to get into a new home. The more the private sector helps those in need the less the burden on taxpayers through government services. Either way someone has to pay whether voluntary or not.

Bottom line, though, is that many of these services were created out of need.

Now, reducing need - that would be a concept. Or reducing the perception that there is need from people who would simply rather not work.

Has that stopped them so far?

The fact that something is illegal doesn't stop anybody from doing anything unless they have a moral objection to doing something illegal, or unless it's unprofitable to do it because the illegality raises the penalty enough to actually matter. Right now, most penalties don't really matter to large companies (though they certainly do to little ones!).

If there's more money to be made breaking the law than following it, private companies will break the law. They are not as impressed with the importance of the law as you are, I don't think.

Besides, it's only illegal right now. With the current trend toward deregulation of anything that somebody could make money off of, how are we supposed to believe that it's going to stay illegal? We've seen how hard it is for a wealthy company to buy enough politicians to have the laws changed. It's a lot easier to form a monopoly right now than it has been in the past specifically because the law has been changed by politicians who were influenced by lobbyists. Heck, these days, they pretty much just put the lobbyists in charge of the industry.

As to the OP, I agree that it's better if everyone can just take care of themselves, and self-reliance is the key component of independence, and all of that. But in the real world, not everybody can take care of themselves, and nobody can take care of everybody, except everybody. We, the people of the United States, can take care of we, the people of the United States. No individual or private charity is capable of that.

So I say we do take care of ourselves, and each other, and we'll all benefit and live in a happier, more productive, less desperate society. Would that really be so terrible? Will it really keep any of you up at night to know that you've paid your taxes so that somebody else can live? I don't think so.

"Has that stopped them so far?"

Yes, the microsoft breakup, the baby bells, the list goes on.


"It's a lot easier to form a monopoly right now than it has been in the past specifically because the law has been changed by politicians who were influenced by lobbyists. Heck, these days, they pretty much just put the lobbyists in charge of the industry."

This is why we must stop putting these politicians in office and vote for somone of integrity.

"So I say we do take care of ourselves, and each other, and we'll all benefit and live in a happier, more productive, less desperate society. Would that really be so terrible? Will it really keep any of you up at night to know that you've paid your taxes so that somebody else can live? I don't think so."

This is just my point, the Feds are doing a poor job of managing our tax dollars, so lets ellect somone who will give us back our tax dollars and let us take care of ourselves.