I'm just not sure how you get around a private market inevitably letting people die.
If someone can't afford healthcare, and in your vision we should refuse to provide it, then they die. That means, unfortunately, you are advocating for their death.
Which is fine, maybe. Except that we still have to deal with that. If they can't afford to dispose of their own bodies, now what?
No matter how you cut it, we either go back to the government or everything is awful.
Me asking you if you want to scrape bodies off the freeway isnt rhetorical. It might seem that way, because it's so extreme, but that's the reality here.
Someone, somewhere, has to pay for that. We already established that the person themselves cannot do it.
Should it be you? Should it be me? Or should it be everyone? If you answer everyone, congratulations, you've reinvented taxes.
The issue here is that these are already solved problems. Why do you think governments invented taxes hundreds of years ago? To steal from you? Look at the big picture.
Under a free market, medical care will be cheap. There's no particular reason why health care should be so expensive, but every time the government takes it over, that's the result.
Look how cheap your cell phone is, despite the amazing engineering that went into it. Pretty much everyone has a cell phone, both rich and poor.
> Under a free market, medical care will be cheap.
This isn't an argument - this is an ideology, a pure faith.
There's no mechanism for this. Some things are just expensive.
Performing a surgery is expensive no matter what. It requires advanced machines and multiple humans with ideally decades of specialized training.
There may be "cheap" surgeries if there's no regulation, in the same way we have cheap shit on Temu - it's junk and doesn't work.
The cell phone reference you made kind of says it all - yes we have cheap cell phones. Most of them are shit.
We don't want shit medicine, shit surgeries, or shit chemotherapy. We want stuff that works.
Also, elephant in the room: products and services are necessarily different.
A phone is a PRODUCT. Medical care is a SERVICE. The difference being cheap products are good, sometimes, cheap services are bad.
We don't want a surgery to cost 100 dollars because that means the doctors are making, like, 2 bucks an hour. Which means we're living in a third world shit hole.
You don't want to live in a third world shit hole, do you? Great, then we're on the same page.
And, elephant number 2: healthcare can never, under any circumstances, be a free market. No matter how hard you try.
When you get sick and need to go to the hospital you might naively think the market of hospitals is thousands. This is wrong. Its actually a monopoly - there is only one hospital you can go to.
This is because of what healthcare is fundamentally - a service to keep you alive. You will go to whatever hospital is closest, because the human will to live transcends markets and even money as a concept.
This means, in a free market, it's not free at all - it's filled with only monopolies who can effectively charge whatever they want - which is exactly what we see.
The only places this doesn't happen is in places in which healthcare is nationalized. Because said countries know a free market is impossible, they don't even try, and they avoid the monopolization that's inevitable.
Some other people will naively point to systems in which there are both public and private options - and note that the private options are cheap and effective.
But that's only the case because of the public options. When private care has to compete with low cost public care, it will be cheap. If you remove that competition by privatizing all healthcare, then they can, once again, effectively charge whatever they want.
If someone can't afford healthcare, and in your vision we should refuse to provide it, then they die. That means, unfortunately, you are advocating for their death.
Which is fine, maybe. Except that we still have to deal with that. If they can't afford to dispose of their own bodies, now what?
No matter how you cut it, we either go back to the government or everything is awful.
Me asking you if you want to scrape bodies off the freeway isnt rhetorical. It might seem that way, because it's so extreme, but that's the reality here.
Someone, somewhere, has to pay for that. We already established that the person themselves cannot do it.
Should it be you? Should it be me? Or should it be everyone? If you answer everyone, congratulations, you've reinvented taxes.
The issue here is that these are already solved problems. Why do you think governments invented taxes hundreds of years ago? To steal from you? Look at the big picture.