Anytime people are removed from the cost of a thing, the price goes up. Housing, education, healthcare. Even buying groceries people spend more than twice as much with a credit card vs cash.
If removing something from the market led directly to massively inflated costs, we'd expect those systems to be the most expensive, but that's just not true.
Elective services like dermatology and cosmetic have managed to keep prices in line with what people can afford to pay out of pocket.
The other inflators in the US has been emergency room visits for people with no coverage at all, which are 10x more expensive than simply visiting a primary care physician. Plans pushing for funded HSAs would totally eliminate this problem as even the poorest people would have a reason to go where they could get more cost effective care.
I want to mention one very specific thing about this though, these services are very different than other medical services not just because of the difference in insurance markets, but also because unlike many, many procedures they are elective.
The health market is so interesting because one of the normal recourses available to market participants normally, that is doing without, is not available in certain situations int he health market.
> The war itself played a major role in the growth of health insurance, according to a March 2002 history of health insurance benefits from the Employee Benefit Research Institute, a think tank that examines employment-based benefits. Wages had been frozen by the National War Labor Board amid a shortage of workers as many potential employees went off to fight in the war. Employers sought to get around the wage controls in order to attract scarce workers. Providing them health insurance was one way to do that, EBRI said.
> "During this time, employers petitioned, and were granted to have benefits, particularly health benefits, not be considered part of wages," Stephen Blakely, the director of communications and managing editor at EBRI, told us. "Congress agreed to exempt health insurance benefits from taxation."
http://www.politifact.com/virginia/statements/2014/oct/30/ja...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_insurance_in_the_Unit...
See History
Nobody is saying unions are perfect, but corporations and plutocrats aren't going anywhere, and labor is the only countervailing force.
You don't have to be arrogant about your own abilities to realize that promotion based on seniority would privilege longer-tenured workers over better, lesser-tenured workers.
That doesn't just hurt the best workers -- it hurts anyone who is above the average.
Promotion based on seniority is a common feature of union contracts, so it's a valid concern.
Some people like seniority-based promotion because it can reduce discrimination in promotion decisions. For example, a woman could be promoted based on seniority even though her sexist boss might prefer a less-qualified, less-tenured male candidate. That would certainly be unfair, and seniority-based promotion could prevent that. However, the tech industry is currently mostly men, which means that any female employee who joins a large company will have at least a few decades' worth of men ahead of her in line for a promotion, no matter how good she is at her job. Seniority-based promotion would actually entrench gender diversity problems for at least 20 years, rather than solve them. The only way it would have positive effects vis a vis diversity would be to impose it on a workforce that is already diverse but has discriminatory managers.
If you are average: Given that most people are average (because that's what average means), you aren't an outlier, so you wouldn't expect a faster or slower promotion timeline in a meritocratic system than in a seniority based system. After all, the majority of people more senior than you at any company are likely to be average too (because that's what average means), unless the company has an unusual distribution of employee skill across the tenure spectrum. In a meritocratic system, you are still average, and you would still have an average promotion timeline. If you are average, it doesn't much matter what system you have.
If you are above average: Your talent will be recognized, and you will be promoted faster than most of your peers in a meritocratic system. In a seniority-based system, people who are not as good as you will be promoted before you because they have worked at the company longer. This hurts you, and it hurts the company, because both could do better under a meritocracy. You should prefer a meritocratic system over a seniority-based system.
If you are below average: In a meritocratic system, you would be promoted as a last resort, when better people are not available. In a seniority-based system, you will be promoted just because you stuck around, even if you suck. You should prefer a seniority-based system over a meritocratic system.
If you are a worker at any level, and you improve your job skills and your value to the company, that will increase your promotion prospects in a meritocratic system, but not change them in any way in a seniority-based system. So why would anyone try to improve or work hard in a seniority-based system?
It's very simple: when a group of people are considered for a promotion, the person who has the most seniority, i.e. has been at the company for the longest time, will automatically be given the promotion.
That doesn't mean the guy in charge of the mail room is going to be promoted to head of engineering because he's been there longer than any of the engineers. Promotions happen within departments. But you can damn well bet that the guy in charge of the mail room is the mail room employee who has been at the company the longest, no matter how good he is at his job.
Any system that doesn't work like this is not a "seniority-based" system, and is outside of the scope of the discussion.
Can you provide empirical evidence with actual seniority based systems that match the very strict description you've supplied? Because if not what you have is an unsupported hypothesis, not a description of reality.
For example, we could push for industry-wide standardized job level requirements that are demographic-blind. This would reduce agism, sexism, and other blind (or not-so-blind) biases.
This would also benefit businesses by normalizing job requirements across businesses (for example: reducing interview costs and avoiding spending internal resources on defining requirements).
But in the short term, I suggest the focus be on preserving the industry from the large number of threats it now faces via cooperation from all roles in the industry. Once a habit of cooperation emerges, further future cooperation among members would be very likely.