OCCOM BILL wrote:There is only one best cardiologist and he can't treat everyone. The best (and better) anything is always going to be the most expensive
In the Dutch system, a hospital will have a department of, say, cardiology, and people who call for an appointment are divided equally among the cardiologists. Cardiologists have no right to pick and choose only certain patients, for example only the ones with expensive insurance.
Your point
does hold up for, say, psychiatrists, who can just open up their own shop, separate from the hospitals and municipal mental health care clinics. But both GPs and hospitals have to accept subsidized patients and private-insurance patients alike, and the doctors working in the hospitals are simply assigned patients by rote.
OCCOM BILL wrote:and if you attempt to regulate out his ability to charge accordingly; all you will accomplish is replacing fair competition with a system of bribery where some parasitical piece of **** profits in lieu of the man who legitimately deserves the higher premium (which of course, discourages that man from existing at all).
I dont understand what you're saying here, and dont recognize what problem you'd have with, for example, hospital cardiologists being assigned patients by rote, without distinction between state- or subsidized-insurance ones and private-insurance ones
OCCOM BILL wrote:Ask any former Soviet what government regulated "fair playing fields" accomplish;
I think there was a whole lot more wrong with Soviet-style government than its pretense of wanting to create "fair playing fields". I think that the miserable quality of Soviet health care can far more plausibly be attributed to that range of flaws that come with dictatorial communism, than with the principle of regulation promoting fair playing fields.
To wit, there is a bevvy of West-European social- and christian-democracies that have also put a lot of regulation in place to create something a lot more like a "fair playing field" than what you have in America - and apart from a country like, say, Italy, it hasnt devolved at all into the "favor-system of friends and bribes" that you describe.
The "if you put regulation in place to curb the market's injustices you move toward the Soviet system and you know how that worked out" argument is black and white thinking, and I think a straw-man too. Putting regulation in place to do just that, does not correlate with moving toward a Soviet system. All it moves you towards is a more social-democratic system, and when it comes to health care access, quality and costs, those social-democratic systems havent done too badly at all compared to the States.
