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7 Responses to “John Stossel Summarizes Perfectly Why I’m Against Universal Healthcare”
So yeah, his anecdotal, unverified evidence and massaged, unsourced statistics are about as convincing as Michael Moore’s. I’m glad you found a libertarian equivalent to start linking.
ANyway, I’m tired of the assumption that single-payee healthcare is neccesarily the same as Soviet-style healthcare. I agree that the government couldn’t run the system well onit’s own, and if anyone actually propses that plan I’ll be against it. But there’s no reason the government can’t pay for whatever procedures anyone needs, and still let them choose which doctor or hospitaal to go to on the free market.
But don’t you see that it isn’t a free market if the government foots the bill? There is no requirement for individuals to make the cost-benefit analyses that are essential for an efficient market.
They still have an incentive to find the best care available, which will ensure that America continues to have innovation and high quality care. Yes, there’s no free-market forces keeping the prices down, but opponents aren’t arguing that it will be more expensive, they’re arguing it would be inferior care.
As prices spiral out of control and the program goes way over budget, which it inevitably would, the government would begin setting how much it would pay for certain procedures or medicines, and this would largely destroy the market.
Yes, the government would have to set up some type of pricing guidelines. THis does not remove the incentiv for people to choose the best healthcare available.
In a free market, price is NOT the only factor that companies compete on. Consumers choose products based on price, quality, branding, convenience, recommendations, and a host of other criterion. Remove any single one of them (in this case, price) and the free market still operates just fine on all the others.
Except that prices are the result of quality, branding, etc, the cost of production, and how much consumers want the product and are willing to pay for it. Prices are a reflection of all these things. In a government created pricing system the market would work backwards–we’d start with a price and create products/services around that price. This would limit health care providers in the quality of care they could or would provide since they could only cover a set amount of costs and make a set amount of profit. Economic incentive to innovate dies, or the government throws money at the problem to create incentives but I don’t trust the government to lead the healthcare industry, do you?
I trust millions of people talking to their doctors and making important individual decisions with their wallets. I trust the market.
I’m not sure I agree with you here Darwin. If there’s one thing we can trust the free market to do (barring market failures like monopolies), it’s make things cheaper, so price seems like the last thing we should let go of in terms of markets.
Clearly not EVERYONE can have the best healthcare available - the supply of top notch health care is lower than the demand of the entire population’s medical needs (the only way that could ever possibly happen is if all healthcare workers were replaced by robots at some point in the future and economies of scale made it more efficient to have all of them be the same).
Are you going to set up a bureaucracy to decide who get priority access to the higher-quality healthcare and who gets the lower-quality healthcare?
I agree that the system needs to be changed but making the taxpayer foot the bill isn’t going to address the problem that medical care is obscenely costly. It may seem coldhearted to put a price on human health and life, but we do that every day when we weigh the health benefits versus the economic costs of things like how heavily to regulate air pollution, elevator safety, ect.
If we’re talking about mechanisms to improve the pricing scheme of medicine, it’d make more sense to see something like the creation of federal subsidies for cheap healthcare, especially for those that could offer quality that was nearly as good. Once you had companies that gathered enough momentum to stand on their own in that market sector, you could phase out the subsidies. Sure, the cheap healthcare would be a few years behind the curve at any given time, but is that worse than having things be so expensive that the uninsured sector of the population is unable to afford any treatment at all?
Is that worse than spending the money on helping sick people that we could use towards noble purposes like rewarding homeowners and corporations for behaving irresponsibly?
September 29th, 2008 at 7:26 pm
“…. But Americans are different!”
So yeah, his anecdotal, unverified evidence and massaged, unsourced statistics are about as convincing as Michael Moore’s. I’m glad you found a libertarian equivalent to start linking.
ANyway, I’m tired of the assumption that single-payee healthcare is neccesarily the same as Soviet-style healthcare. I agree that the government couldn’t run the system well onit’s own, and if anyone actually propses that plan I’ll be against it. But there’s no reason the government can’t pay for whatever procedures anyone needs, and still let them choose which doctor or hospitaal to go to on the free market.
September 30th, 2008 at 11:32 am
But don’t you see that it isn’t a free market if the government foots the bill? There is no requirement for individuals to make the cost-benefit analyses that are essential for an efficient market.
September 30th, 2008 at 1:51 pm
They still have an incentive to find the best care available, which will ensure that America continues to have innovation and high quality care. Yes, there’s no free-market forces keeping the prices down, but opponents aren’t arguing that it will be more expensive, they’re arguing it would be inferior care.
September 30th, 2008 at 9:47 pm
As prices spiral out of control and the program goes way over budget, which it inevitably would, the government would begin setting how much it would pay for certain procedures or medicines, and this would largely destroy the market.
September 30th, 2008 at 10:41 pm
Yes, the government would have to set up some type of pricing guidelines. THis does not remove the incentiv for people to choose the best healthcare available.
In a free market, price is NOT the only factor that companies compete on. Consumers choose products based on price, quality, branding, convenience, recommendations, and a host of other criterion. Remove any single one of them (in this case, price) and the free market still operates just fine on all the others.
October 1st, 2008 at 1:16 pm
Except that prices are the result of quality, branding, etc, the cost of production, and how much consumers want the product and are willing to pay for it. Prices are a reflection of all these things. In a government created pricing system the market would work backwards–we’d start with a price and create products/services around that price. This would limit health care providers in the quality of care they could or would provide since they could only cover a set amount of costs and make a set amount of profit. Economic incentive to innovate dies, or the government throws money at the problem to create incentives but I don’t trust the government to lead the healthcare industry, do you?
I trust millions of people talking to their doctors and making important individual decisions with their wallets. I trust the market.
October 1st, 2008 at 3:20 pm
I’m not sure I agree with you here Darwin. If there’s one thing we can trust the free market to do (barring market failures like monopolies), it’s make things cheaper, so price seems like the last thing we should let go of in terms of markets.
Clearly not EVERYONE can have the best healthcare available - the supply of top notch health care is lower than the demand of the entire population’s medical needs (the only way that could ever possibly happen is if all healthcare workers were replaced by robots at some point in the future and economies of scale made it more efficient to have all of them be the same).
Are you going to set up a bureaucracy to decide who get priority access to the higher-quality healthcare and who gets the lower-quality healthcare?
I agree that the system needs to be changed but making the taxpayer foot the bill isn’t going to address the problem that medical care is obscenely costly. It may seem coldhearted to put a price on human health and life, but we do that every day when we weigh the health benefits versus the economic costs of things like how heavily to regulate air pollution, elevator safety, ect.
If we’re talking about mechanisms to improve the pricing scheme of medicine, it’d make more sense to see something like the creation of federal subsidies for cheap healthcare, especially for those that could offer quality that was nearly as good. Once you had companies that gathered enough momentum to stand on their own in that market sector, you could phase out the subsidies. Sure, the cheap healthcare would be a few years behind the curve at any given time, but is that worse than having things be so expensive that the uninsured sector of the population is unable to afford any treatment at all?
Is that worse than spending the money on helping sick people that we could use towards noble purposes like rewarding homeowners and corporations for behaving irresponsibly?