This is a great discussion.
Isn't the elephant in the room simply that virtually all current trend lines head towards disaster in terms of costs and ability for citizens to bear those costs?
Well, yes. The annual health care expense, per individual, is almost $10,000 per year in this country. That's healthcare, add another 20 to 30% for insurance.
Say you make twice minimum wage. $15 an hour. Say you have a family of four. That's $40K in annual health care expenses and a $30,000 annual income.
It's not the trend lines that are the problem, the status quo is already idiotic. Health care costs will implode the US. Obamacare is not going to fix it, the market is not going to fix it.
What's going to fix it?
How do you justify the claim that a free market wouldn't fix it? The free market is the most efficient method for setting prices for all goods and services. It's axiomatic and verifiably true.
Sure, with pork bellies.
Short of lettin' cute lil wee bairns die screaming in the streets, a free medical market is a pipe dream.
There's also just the humanistic side of this. Free-market economic theory also
guarantees that there will "poor people". The system can't work without the bottom rungs of the ladder in place. What if this glorious free market health care system finds its equilibrium price-point but it's out of reach for a large segment of society? How does THAT solve anything? We still gotta have people flipping burgers and pumping gas.
SINCE HATARI BROUGHT IT UP- as in, I'm not trolling here- consider for a moment the simplicity of a single-payer system. You know the cost to serve your "herd", you divide that into the size of your herd, and you come up with an unavoidable tax- say a sales tax on everything but food- to cover it, then you let the rest of your more or less free-market economy adjust to the new reality. You've now stripped out multiple layers of profit seeking from the system.
Further, while that might put a damper on cutting-edge medical "stuff".... most medicine ain't that. It's fairly straightforward stuff that doctors figured out a century ago.
It's just a thought but I agree with Hatari that it's at least worth considering given how FUBAR things are... and it's not like the AHCA fixes anything.
