That is like saying people are starving in Africa because of a free market in food. It is ridiculous.
People are starving in Africa because of perpetual poverty. If you're saying that's the case in the United States, you'd be wrong. The situation is not analogous. Excluding the Great Depression, Americans have never really known poverty on a massive scale; yet the cost of health care is exorbitant to the point of being out of reach even to upper middle class families who are self-employed. Not having insurance, or not being insurable (government regulations) makes health care access literally unattainable for more than 80% of the population when it would be most needed.
They are starving because they don't have enough food because they haven't saved and invested enough in agriculture. Their lack of a free market throughout history is why people starve in Africa.
Are you serious? This statement is way off base Optimus. The problems in Africa have next to nothing to do with self-governing economics and almost everything to do with centuries of colonialism.
150 years ago people died because they prescribed leeches to treat the flu, not because the government didn't withhold treatment from one person to give it to another.
And 70 years ago people died because they didn't have money to treat what were at the time very treatable diseases. Ten seconds ago an American died because an insurance company refused to pay for treatment for one reason or another. My own aunt died of lung cancer because she already had four surgeries and somehow exceeded some obscure mathematical cost-to-benefit ratio that more or less rationed her care from a pool of funds. I don't want to engage in a series of anecdotal arguments, however, the point being is that you are mistaken if you think that historically or even presently people don't die because they are unable to pay.
Health care is prohibitively expensive, and most are led to believe that having health insurance means that when health care costs become too expensive the company holding the policy will pick up the slack. The entire point of the Affordable Health Care act is to stop the common practice of insurance companies dumping sick people in life or death situations because it's simply not cost effective to pay for their treatment. Government regulation is absolutely required because the free market completely failed. I cannot understand your argument against the reality of the situation. The free market, as it relates to health insurance, never worked to begin with - as the companies involved abused their positions and policyholders routinely and prevented legal action by colluding with common contracts wherein the fine print absolves the insurance company of wrongdoing in most, if not all, instances that they drop a policy even if the patient is in dire need of care.
The market economy is what has single handedly increased the standard of living in every liberalized economy in the world. When you have capitalists investing in production, you get more innovation, more products, lower prices, and increased access.
This isn't always true. Products are sold for whatever the market will bare (i.e., Apple products). Capitalism does not always create lower prices as there is currency that devalues, property depreciation, inflationary aspects brought about through lending practices of the banking system, cost of goods, salary and wage increases, global competition with developing countries, etc. When speaking of insurance and health care, it's not so easy to slap together a profitable product to sell at a lower cost than your competitor. But more importantly you should be careful of you're insistence on a purely capitalist approach. You should note that you're speaking of hypothetical models that only exist and work within a bubble, completely outside reality - that have no actual historical evidence of ever having worked the way the theory predicts. There is no historic evidence that a free market of a service like health insurance will ultimately lead to lower prices.
We've seen this play out time and time again when liberals regulate, prices go up, when conservatives deregulate, prices go up. It's just not as simple as continually saying, year in and year out, "free markets solve all ails." They have they're function. Just as government regulations do.
No one was dying in the streets before Medicare,
Are you serious? The elderly died all the time before Medicare. How can you possibly say that?
although by then the money printing machine and government backed medical cartel would have priced people out of health care without it. Instead of solving the problem, they created Medicare to put a band aid on it until the prices rise high enough that the government can't confiscate enough private money to pay for it.
What?? How does the "medical cartel" benefit from Medicare more so than the recipients of the program? It's one of the best health care access programs in the world. And while it is underfunded presently, reform (expansion to younger people and raising the taxation rate) is far preferable than scrapping the program.
Remember, Medicare is for persons over 65. Who over 65 wouldn't want Medicare? Go out and ask 10 people over 65 if they'd prefer to pay for private insurance and go without Medicare. Good luck with that.
Point being: it's senseless to just knock programs because they're "big government." That's being an ideologue. Rather, look at the net benefit to society and humanity and evaluate from that standpoint. Would we really be better off without government intervention in the health insurance/care industry? Really? If that's you're argument, I'd like to hear how you can back that up with some amount of evidence.
Yes people pay taxes for it. That doesn't mean anything. If the government passed a one time $10 tax to pay for a brand new car for every American, does that mean every is entitled to new car because they paid for it?
Have no idea what you mean by this..
But if you're asking me are people "entitled" to health care? I'd say yes. I believe that health care is a right of all the people of the United States and that no person should be denied life-saving care for financial reasons. The government, and therefore the people, should pay. We are the only Western nation where that statement is not the law of the land.
Ignoring the immorality of seizing the property of everyone to pay for services that not everyone wants or uses, they simply don't take enough in taxes.
This single statement ignores the fact that the people govern themselves by way of government and that they fund said government via taxation. It isn't immoral because we live in a republic where taxation happens through a public legislative process. It isn't theft, it's a tax.
Furthermore, this anarchist reasoning just doesn't make sense if we simultaneously hold that government has a function, that government must exist in some form, and that government has the power to tax the people to fund those functions.
They can raise taxes, and if they manage to collect more that way, then they will have patched up the hole in the raft for a little while longer, but eventually they will have two choices, fix the price of health care, which will leave untold numbers of people without access to care whether they can pay or not, or get out of the business of health care.
Your two solutions create a false dilemma where one does not exist. You presuppose and simultaneously assert that the cost of health insurance will continually rise without factoring the reasons for the recent trends. In 10-15 years the costs of health insurance will likely plateau as the aging baby boomers reach their average life expectancy. Standards of living and quality of life are actually increasing. And yes, people are living longer, but without as much need for medical intervention. To that end, a universal mandate for health insurance (one that's legal) would reduce costs tremendously. Creating a system of preventative care and a stock exchange of health insurance securities would also use free market principles to lower costs of coverage by trading bundled risks at different rates.
In summation, I think it unwise to let health insurance companies regulate and police themselves in a completely "free" market. It historically leads to corruption, price fixing (by the corporations), and the least beneficial outcome for the clients of these services. A better solution would be for the people to use their collective power to bargain with the companies that provide these services and receive the lowest rates possible. The best tool for such a collective bargaining would be the Congress acting as a representative of the People of the United States.