Hacker News Reader

Comment by yosefk | Hacker News Reader

You can't choose not to eat, yet food prices don't rise like healthcare prices.

I think TFA did a pretty good job showing the difficulty of pinning the problem on market failure, government failure etc. At least any confident explanation must come with numbers and not just passionate words showing where the money went.

View on HN

You have to eat, but you can choose what to eat. The beef farmer has to compete against the pig farmer and the bean farmers.

I don't have an explanation, but your counter doesn't fit either.

> yet food prices don't rise like healthcare prices.

agricultural subsidies and price support (government agrees to purchase unsold surplus of many crops) are a huge contributor here.

also consider the externalities. the price of cheap beef is that 60 years from now a global climate crisis will cost the entire world thousands of trillions of dollars, and probably lots of lost lives as well.

The price trends of food and healthcare couldn't be more different. There's clearly something more than agricultural subsidies at work explaining the difference, given healthcare receives many fold more subsidies. In fact, it's possible that receiving compatively little in sibsidies is one reason that food prices have declined. An even more likely explanation for the price decline of food is that consumers are incentivizes to bargain hunt when buying food, since doing so reduces what they pay, and thus a real consumer-driven market, that rewards efficiency, exists in food. In healthcare, with private/government insurance, there is no incentive for consumers to bargain hunt.

Another factor that likely contributes to the divergence in prices is that healthcare is heavily regulated while food production is not anywhere near as constrained by government mandates.

food production and distribution is also heavily regulated. the USDA inspects farms for safety and sanitation. the FDA inspects food processors for safety and sanitation and inspects food products for safety and purity (whether or not the item in the package is what it claims to be).

I don't know precisely how this compares with the degree of regulation and government intervention in the healthcare sector, but I wish you would try to make a more concrete argument with some examples or citations. as is it really seems as if you're arguing purely from ideology.

>food production and distribution is also heavily regulated.

Nowhere near as much as healthcare. Sorry I can't provide any concrete evidence of that

The most obvious problem with healthcare prices is that consumers are removed two steps* from paying for it, so there's little price pressure. But it's hard to have an insurance-based system while also providing an incentive to choose a lower cost provider.

* first by insurance, and second by the employer/government paying for the bulk of that insurance

That's why we shouldn't have an insurance based system. Like Ron Paul (who has been a medical doctor since the early 1960s) says, health insurance should be for catastrophic medical events, not for routine checkups and minor ailments and illnesses.

That's how Singapore does it, which is probably fine. A shame nobody their system hasn't come up as a viable option over here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com