The Healthcare Debate

[digitalpoetry]

Among all the other rhetoric flying around about health care, one sentiment keeps jumping out at me. I've heard it repeated in several places by a variety of people: "if all these people are so angry about the president's plan, why is no one proposing any alternative solutions

Comments

[gillan]

The thing is, no matter how much supply increases, demand will remain constant and people who end up with debilitating or terminal illnesses will still go bankrupt paying for it if they are uninsured or if the current health insurance racket persists.

[digitalpoetry]

The point is that price is just an indicator of the relationship between supply and demand - if you raise the supply faster than the demand, the price will fall.

Yes, people with chronic conditions of whatever variety will need to spend more money on healthcare than their healthier counterparts - but the care itself will be (drastically) less expensive than it is now. Any kind of national healthcare system will raise the price (by further restricting supply and/or increasing demand) - the fact that someone other than the person receiving the care is paying for most of it doesn't make it less expensive, it just means that whoever is eventually footing the bill (in this case, taxpayers, including the sick) have to pay a larger total sum than they would with a free-market solution.

That equates to a lot of money that could be going to find better medicines, treatments, etc. for those chronic conditions.

[gillan]

For me, any system that forces sick people to go bankrupt is not an acceptable solution and I have a philosophical disagreement with the idea that the sick should have to pay for their healthcare. But hey, I'm one of those socialists people keep screaming about.

And I just don't understand, then, how countries like Canada and Great Britain haven't buckled under exactly the problem you're describing.

[digitalpoetry]

I said nothing about forcing sick people to go bankrupt - if anything, they'd have a higher average standard of living than they do currently, or would under a more socialist system, because the total cost of their care would be far lower. It's also entirely possible (and desirable) to set up voluntary non-governmental solutions like charities and non-profit hospitals to help people in that situation. With the cost of care being lower, such solutions would be easier to implement

Seriously:

[hellishdream]

1)Healthcare is not optional. There can be no supply and demand curve of Health. Think if someone tried to limit the air supply. People will pay dearly to live

Re: Seriously:

[digitalpoetry]

In answer to your point 1, the fact that people are required to have a particular type of good or service to survive doesn't invalidate basic economic laws. Take food as an example - food is generally thought of as more necessary to survival than healthcare, so why doesn't General Mills raise the prices on their cereal to the point where we have to take out loans to keep ourselves fed? It's because food is a much freer market than health: if General Mills raises their prices, Kellogg's can take away a large portion of their business by selling a similar product at a lower price. Open and unrestricted competition always pushes down prices, because if someone tries to sell their product at an exorbitant markup, that just creates an opportunity for other people to undercut them, and they'll lose business