@maxdancona,
maxdancona wrote:
You can't limit prices in a free market system. I think you are missing the point.
If I go to a car dealer and say, "I need a new car, I have $500 and no credit". They are going to ignore me. I will leave without a new car. I might be able to buy a crappy used car for that... but I wouldn't have money to keep it running. I would end up without a car.. and everyone in society will think that it alright.
The problem is you have a large class of people who make fairly little money but they don't have access to good education because they only understand the concept of easy money affording them all the spoils of a wealthy society. They need to understand that if they learn how bodily processes function and how medicines work, they can provide their own health care.
Quote:No one would ever tell a car dealer that they have to sell me a car for the money I have. If they did that, car dealers would go out of business. That is what you seem to be telling health care providers... that they have to lower prices.
If you want to build your own car, the best thing you could do would be to build a bicycle, i.e. because bicycles run without dependency on fuel and with only a fraction of the parts and materials needed for a car. The problem is that too many people want cars instead of just wanting a bike that they can manage with the money and labor and skills they have and/or can develop on their own.
It is the same with health care. There would be so many possibilities for affordable health care if people would just focus on making generic drugs cheaply and learning basic medical and dental techniques. No, people wouldn't get access to the most expensive patented drugs, etc. but they would have basic healthcare and medicine, which they could provide for themselves instead of making healthcare an entire socialist global stimulus project.
Quote:When my appendix burst, I was whisked into surgery. There were doctors, and nurses and an ER staff (kept open 24/7) and medicine and cleaning crews and electrical bills for the hospital.... the cost to keep me alive was tens of thousands of dollars. You can't lower the price below the cost... you have to pay the doctors, and buy the medicine and keep the electricity on.
You can lower the price of everything by lowering interdependency and consumerist expectations. Everyone doesn't need to drive a car. Everyone doesn't need air-conditioning and heating except in a single, well-insulated room. These consumption cuts are the same cuts needed to reduce greenhouse gases. Reducing the amount of developed square footage and pavement per capita is also needed to restore trees to re-absorb all the CO2.
In short, everyone needs to reduce their economic footprint for the sake of sustainability anyway, and if they do that then everything will cost less because everyone involved with the economy will be making much less money than they are now. People call this communism but it is just austerity. It is good for the environment and sustainability, and when people can afford less unnecessary things, that gives people more free time to study medicine, healthcare, and otherwise improve their quality of life without it requiring expensive machines, drugs, etc.
Quote:I had insurance... good for me. But, if I was poor and without insurance, they would have spent the tens of thousands of dollars to save my life even with the knowledge that it would cost them money. Anyone who stumbles into an ER with a ruptured appendix is going to receive the life-saving medical attention they need.
Right, because they are printing money for themselves and then taxing the insurance companies, government, or whoever will pay to cover the costs. In short, they are spending someone else's money to help you instead of doing it pro-bono by paying themselves and everyone else involved less.
Quote:This insistence in spending money to save someone's life (even when they don't have the money) is one reason the free market doesn't work for health care. We let poor people go without cars, which is why the free market works quite well for the automobile industry.
You are confused. Poor people mostly have cars. We subsidize their driving by paving car-sized public roads and not charging tolls. The so-called middle class are just poor people who are kept fat by socialism. If the great depression had run its course, there would be no middle-class, or rather the middle-class would have adapted to meager conditions and become much more self-sufficient and less consumeristic.
If you want to understand what life would be without socialism, you have to think in terms of what people can learn to do for themselves using what they have available to them. People can mostly manage their own health and basic medicine if they put effort into learning biology, etc. We could then socialize expensive procedures by simply allowing people to learn medical specialties for free instead of giving them giant loans to pay for expensive medical schooling. That would require knowledgeable medical professors working for relatively little money, though. Sufficing on low pay is something most people aren't accustomed to being expected to do, so it doesn't happen; but how can you ever get affordable health care if they don't? Taxing those with money to pay others handsomely just causes those with money to pass the costs on to the market and consumers in various ways. I mean, it's not like you can just starve the rich to death to force them to keep losing money forever. All socialism does is torture people into slavery with the threat of being taxed into poverty - and that threat is only terrifying because of the dependency that has been instilled in people culturally.
