The House Obamacare replacement bill does nothing to end the primary problem with Obamacare, which is the wildly popular but also psychotic ban on rejecting people over pre-existing conditions.
Would you buy car insurance if you could buy it after you crashed your car and still get paid? Would you buy life insurance if your heirs could buy it after you died and have it pay out? Then why would anyone buy health insurance if you can buy it after you already get sick and still be covered? Obamacare’s answer to this was threatening people with the unconstitutional individual mandate ‘tax,’ but they wimped out on actually making the penalty steep enough to force compliance and they wound up putting the insurance industry into an adverse selection death spiral. The House’s answer is to give people tax credits for it, which also is completely inadequate to reverse the death spiral. Nobody is actually going to try to stop the government from destroying the health insurance market entirely. They are going to keep stumbling until they’re forced to institute a single-payer system as an emergency and we’re going to see highly inefficient non-price rationing for health care like in Europe.
At some point people are going to have to accept that we need to actually economize on health care or we will spend the entire GDP of the country on trying to keep everyone alive forever at any cost until the economy collapses. I don’t know that the public is going to ever get to that point though. The government is just going to destroy the market and then blame the market for being destroyed.
Haha, the fact of the matter is that very few have good reason to trust that liberalization isn’t just economic handwaving to justify screwing them over for the benefit of the healthy and the wealthy. Why in the world would they trust you or people like you? Why should they comply with your plan? Normal people lack the tools to tell whether medical service is good! They’re irrational, forgetful, they don’t have perfect executive function, they don’t always have time let alone to learn enough to tell the difference and not get swamped by legalese created by companies to screw them.
You want to get this liberalization to go through? You need to take a lesson from Trump. You’re going to have to publicly sacrifice something very expensive to prove that you’re serious. Charity is NOT going to cut it.
Everything you just said applies many times over in the opposite direction
“ Haha, the fact of the matter is that very few have good reason to trust that regulation isn’t just economic handwaving to justify screwing them over for the benefit of the healthy and the wealthy. Why in the world would they trust you or people like you? Why should they comply with your plan? Legislators lack the tools to tell whether medical service is good! They’re irrational, forgetful, they don’t have perfect executive function, they don’t always have time let alone to learn enough to tell the difference and not get swamped by legalese created by companies to screw them.”
I find it very hard, in the general case, to see “giving people free stuff, but in a different way”, as screwing over. Given that a reasonable alternative is “you get nothing” (this is definitely reasonable, as people 60 years ago did not receive medical care from the state and nobody thinks this was screwing anything), why the hell should you be allowed to tar refactoring the system as “screwing”
I’m guessing this applies to me and not SE…
That basically ignores the massive impact that both random chance and imbalances of power have on people. Illness is largely not distributed in a meritocratic way, and even just staying employed in a Capitalist system can contribute to it.
Also, there was a post not long ago about normalizing private charity as the way to provide healthcare for those who can’t afford it, which implies that the alternative is indeed “you get nothing,” since there is no way that private charity will truly replace the cost.
Mostly, though, I don’t mind some level, quite possibly even a very significant level, of liberalization, but I’m seeking something from a basket of ideological trades. Think of it in the vein of “you hate minimum wage because it lowers employment, I think we normally would need minimum wage because those at the bottom are often desperate (thus less negotiating power) and they have a minimum cost for survival, so let’s ideologically trade by lowering minimum wage while simultaneously issuing direct wage subsidies.”
Or having a well-regulated insurance requirement for worker safety or environmental damage by corporations, since causing damage is so much cheaper than fixing it, executives are gone before the damage actually hits, the company can cause more damage than it can ever pay back, etc, so not having a pot of money to solve it creates externalities… That sort of thing. Technically, it’s a kind of state intervention. Technically, it’s a kind of wealth transfer. Also, it pulls on optimization from markets in the hope of more accurately pricing the externalities of injuries/environmental damage/etc. So is it a “market solution”? Or is it evil Statism? Etc.
