Why free-market health care doesn't work ..

[lihan161051]

With the ink on recent SCOTUS decision on the individual-mandate provision of the Affordable Care Act still not quite dry, it's worth discussing some of the benefits and shortcomings of that measure as well as why it is a good thing for now, but is not a good thing in the long term

Comments

[lihan161051]

Most of what I was trying to analyze was the ways in which both scarcity economy and the captive-market aspect of health care in a service-delivery model lead to the kind of runaway pricing we've seen, and explain why provider pricing has always expanded to strain the limits of payers' resources (regardless of the identity or nature of the payers in question) and always will as long as we try to apply free-market models to for-profit providers and payers, so in that sense, that aspect of the current system is fundamentally broken.

You're absolutely right that the treatment paradigm can have an enormous effect on the dynamics of everything having to do with health care, and there are potential technological game-changers in the form of on-demand manufacturing of all sorts of medical technology. I didn't dive too deeply into changing the paradigm itself because there are large corporate interests heavily invested in preserving their own profitability in the health care market, often at the expense of pursuing innovation that might actually shift that paradigm, and in fact that inertia is an integral part of what's got the system stuck in its current dysfunctional state. The problem is that the part of this society with the resources to either pay for or deliver what the majority think of as health care services cannot think outside the framework of business management and Wall Street finance, and keep trying to make this system fit into it and can't see how fundamentally flawed that reasoning is. Which is why I focused mostly on economic analysis -- it's the only language that segment of the society understands.

And you have an excellent point about the value of experiencing illness as a natural part of life and learning not to fear mortality with the conventional mad race to win a few more last breaths. That's another aspect of the equation that doesn't fit at all into a hard economic analysis, and it's a worthwhile dimension to the larger space in which the problem lives. But what I was mostly trying to demonstrate was that even in the language and conceptual framework of the business/finance payer/provider class, their own reasoning is fundamentally flawed, and even by their own logic, their own free-market model will only lead us further astray. There are infinitely more dimensions to the actual question than that, but I'm arguing against them in their own language from their own scripture ..