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

[nyyki]

This is a transitional problem, to some degree. There's a lot of difficulties with "health Insurance", the most fundamental being that it's not like typical insurance, in that everyone is going to need some sort of health care in their lives, meaning that the whole dynamic is skewed. And yes, things are wildly out of control -- the whole HMO concept failed before it even got partially implemented. These problems are a factor of a scarcity economy, and when we get into an abundance economy after truly capable 3d printers come into play a lot of what we think of as societal norms will vaporize. And there are assumptions that are based in the oppressive religious paradigms we have as legacy code in our society -- Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Buddhism being the biggest offenders. Admittedly, it's a hard leap to make for most people to understand that healing serious illness may not be compassionate, instead letting them experience their illness, with its dharmic aspets, so they can return for the next lifetime instead of prolonging

[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