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Comment by Consultant32452 | Hacker News Reader

Emergency care for things like a heart attack or broken bone only account for 2% of healthcare spending. So your primary case for why "shopping around" is bad is mostly irrelevant. Nothing is stopping you from creating a not-for-profit healthcare co-op, getting participants to voluntarily turn over their healthcare decisions to you, and then demanding reduced prices from vendors. All I ask is that you don't force me to join it against my will.

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/oct/...

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I never said anything about emergency care being my "primary case". My comment even specifically lists 2 instances of non-emergency care. Needing to shop around is an absurd concept for any medical care.

Please don't force me against my will to live by the whims of what you personally consider absurd in your own life. You are free to abdicate responsibility and choice to a third party all you like.

Your choice to live by an absurdly low standard of care is what forces the rest of us to suffer from a low standard of care as well (against our will). Your request to "don't force me against my will" is hypocritical.

And when you're dying on the sidewalk in front of the hospital, do you expect them to just let you die there and leave it to the county to dispose of the body? Like it or not it's unreasonable and inhumane to let capitalism condemn someone to a preventable death. Someone has to foot the bill for this. The only question is who and how. The naive answer is to let the hospital eat the loss but ultimately that just means that the rest of the patients pay it in increased costs. You can't sell yourself into slavery, you can't sell your organs, and you can't sign a contract to let the hospital ignore you dying on the sidewalk in front of the ER.

The total sum of all emergency care is less than 2% of healthcare spending in the US. And obviously the majority of that is going to be paid for by the patients, either directly or via insurance. The scenario you're talking about is a rounding error in healthcare spending costs. It certainly doesn't justify forcing people to accept what the likes of Donald Trump considers to be sufficient healthcare.

Could you please not do flamewars on Hacker News?

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