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Comment by shaftoe | Hacker News Reader

Generally, when you want something to remain free from coercion or interference, nationalization isn't the way to go.

I strongly disagree. I think if you want something to remain free from coercion or interference, giving it to the government is the last thing you want to do.

If you want something to remain free from coercion or interference, decentralisation is the way to go.

Edit: Oops! I totally misread your comment ("is" vs "isn't"). Turns out I'm agreeing :)

Governments inflate agency costs ad infinitum without increasing the QoS. This is not a law but based on statistics around the major countries.

Not always. Many European countries have nationalized healthcare, yet manage to have better healthcare outcomes than the US even though they spend much less per capita.

The question isn't why _government_ leads to inflated cost, the question is why _American government_ leads to inflated cost.

Better healthcare outcomes? I think you mean access: For example, the NHS looks very good until you realise that the rankings include access; Based on case-by-case outcome alone, it ranks relatively poorly - certainly less than most people would guess.

The US government spends about the same on healthcare as others do, the difference is in the amount of private healthcare spending.

Is that why America's private healthcare system costs more than any other country and yet we do not have any where near the top outcomes?

What statistics are you cherry picking to make your argument?

Other countries don’t have an entire political party who sees it as their mandate to sabotage all government social services.

Government interference is precisely the cause of our high medical costs (for instance, what do you think would happen to the price of Doritos if the government required everyone to purchase one bag of Doritos every week?).

Second to that is the government interference in farming (specifically, corn subsidies, which have led to an increase of corn products our food, resulting in higher inflammation levels in humans and the animals we eat, obesity, heart disease, diabetes, etc.).

IOW, more government == more worse

Medical costs were skyrocketing before the mandate and that growth has slowed since ACA passage. Your Doritos thought experiment isn't based in reality.

Edit: because its so silly: A better parallel would be a world where everyone needed Doritos. In this world if you found yourself in a situation where you needed Doritos and didn't have it, you could check into a 7/11 and get a bag at the outrageous price of $5.00 for one of those little lunch ones. Thanks to Reagan, your Doritos needs cannot be turned down by 7/11 even if you can't pay. Everyone else has to pay for your overpriced Doritos.

Does it make sense to buy cheap Doritos insurance now instead of the high cost of Emergency Doritos?

How do you juggle that option with the fact that other countries with much more government intervention (or entirely government led, like the NHS) have much cheaper healthcare, and better outcomes.

If everyone mandated that you had to buy dorritos, it's in dorritos interests to put the price up. But if the government produced the dorritos, and the government isn't a for profit business, it's in their interests to keep the prices as low as possible, at cost.

There was this great thread I saw on /r/libertarian, where someone posted some images about the NHS. It was supposed to make 'socialised medicine' look terrible by showing an obese guy costing the NHS £200 a day for a bed while refusing to reduce their diet - "hey look with socialised medicine you are paying for this guy! How bad is that!!!"

However it backfired when all everyone was talking about was how it only cost £200 a day for a bed.

Most people in the US have very little choice in health insurance providers, and very little involvement in the transaction between the insurer and the health care provider. It's technically private but really the customer (patient) is almost excluded. It has lost almost all the attributes of a normal private business.

How do you measure outcomes? The rich in Canada come to the States.

Measuring outcomes is a pretty standard flow and is aggregate. What rich people do is irrelevant as most people are not rich.

You sound very pedantic. Please illustrate yourself and don't talk if you don't know https://data.worldbank.org/topic/public-sector?start=2010

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