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Comment by ajsharp | Hacker News Reader

Capitalism.

This manages to combine ideological battle with fluff, the two things that are worst for Hacker News. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't post like this, regardless of which ideology or which fluff.

This isn't capitalism. If it was capitalism, somebody would come along and offer to let you give birth in their buildings for less than $32k.

I'm not sure what is going on here, but it isn't capitalism.

It's Capitalism applied to something that doesn't have a market, shouldn't have a market, and who's participants are unable to properly participate in it in any way that resembles a market.

The health sector is one of the most regulated sectors in the US. It has nothing to do with free market capitalism.

And yet for profit entities proliferate it at every level, and the constant drumbeat of people against nationalization is for people to be "smart" consumers of healthcare, as if you can make an informed market-based decision about which provider to use while in the back of a damn ambulance.

> as if you can make an informed market-based decision about which provider to use while in the back of a damn ambulance.

That's a pretty bad straw man argument. Of course you have to pick an insurer before the accident happens otherwise it's not insurance.

How does the ambulance know where my insurer wants me to go? For that matter, why is it the responsibility of EMT's to, whilist driving at high speed through traffic and attempting to keep my organs in my torso, go through my insurance info and figure out which hospital I should go to and potentially risk both my and their safety with a longer trip, to respect the wishes of a corporation which barely knows I exist?

How about instead, we just fix people? And figure out the rest of the BS later?

This is a good argument for why we should reject meta-narratives for how the world should work. Capitalism (and/or consumerism?) is one such narrative. Ignore or criticize data points that don't fit the meta-narrative. In that sense, Scandinavian policy is light years ahead, as it is pragmatic and have reasonably high amounts of evidence-driven policy (disclaimer, i live in Sweden).

You mean it isn't capitalism as it's supposed to work in theory.

But it is capitalism like it turns out in practice when the population fears "socialism" and caps on corporate greed.

Middlemanism? A promiscuous value-chain of “service providers”. The capitalism part is that the top terminates at a public corporation or private equity firm.

It's mainly to minimize risk. If everything goes well, home birth is an option, best with a midwife. If it's legal, anyway. But if something goes wrong, you'll end up at hospital, mother and/or child may die or be disabled, and the overall price will likely be greater.

Crony capitalism.

"Crony capitalism is an economy in which businesses thrive not as a result of risk taken for them, but rather, as a return on money amassed through a nexus between a business class and the political class."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crony_capitalism

(exactly what I explained in a separate comment on this thread :-))

With regulatory capture and corruption of the government, isn't our problem a textbook definition of facism (in the academic sense of the word, not in the nazi sense of the word)?

Personally I think the word is overused and too heavily charged, and a more appropriate and descriptive term is corporatism.

I also agree with Chris Hedges and Sheldon Wolin that inverted totalitarianism is an apt definition.

According to the Princeton study of congress, we are also an oligarchy due to the public having almost no influence on legislation, meaning we are not being represented by our elected officials.

I would also argue with the increasing disparity of power and resources between the uber-rich and the rest of, and as the middle class is attacked from all sides and shrinks, that our system also matches the definition of neo-feudalism.

So, to put it all together, America has allowed itself to become a neo-feudal oligarchical corporate inverted totaltarian surveillance state.

Why start with the definitions first? Isn't that backwards?

I don't understand your comment? The question of the post is why does it cost this much? A responder said capitalism, and I am just going further into the various political definitions that describe the current system, which is helpful in inderstanding the original question of the article.

If it's an oligarchical corporate state, then it would make sense that hospitals (companies) abuse of their regulatory capture (oligarchism) are exploiting the majority of people financially and otherwise (neo-fuedalism), largley by making them dependent or subservient to their systems.

How is that backwards?

>I don't understand your comment? The question of the post is why does it cost this much? A responder said capitalism, and I am just going further into the various political definitions that describe the current system, which is helpful in inderstanding the original question of the article.

That's what I am referring to. Instead of looking into some idealistic "political definitions" and say "according to this this system isn't capitalism", we should look into what's going on (in reality) and say "this is what capitalism looks like".

Else it's like those marxists, that instead of accepting that communism can result in a BS bureaucratic state, they said that USSR and co weren't "real communism/socialism", because they didn't match the theory, and that real communism hasn't been tried etc.

That's what I call going backwards. One has a definition, and compares reality against it.

Instead they should derive their definition from what happens in reality -- and maybe even accept that their idealistic definition can't ever happen anyway.

It's like some zoologist had a definition of animal X, and then matched it with various animals and said "this can't be X, because it doesn't match the definition". Well, if that X existed only in theory that's a bad practice. The definition of any X should come from studying actual animals (e.g. this animal species has so and so characteristics, we'll call them an X, e.g. tiger). So, where has this ideal "capitalism" even been seen in the wild?

>That's what I am referring to. Instead of looking into some idealistic "political definitions" and say "according to this this system isn't capitalism", we should look into what's going on (in reality) and say "this is what capitalism looks like".

I'm sorry but thats not how definitions work...

Me, I'd say kleptocracy. Got that from Gibson's Peripheral :)

They aren't mutally exclusive, so I'll add it to my reportoire.

kleptocratic neo-feudal oligarchical corporate inverted totaltarian surveillance state

It is not capitalism. In all the countries mentioned above where child birth is less costly there is significant projected population drop, and governments are under pressure to subsidize families with children.

What I wrote with many many words, you wrote with 1 :)

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