The more I look at things as I age, the more I see market based solutions as only benefiting the supplier and always hurting the consumer.
It makes me a bit bonkers, because well-designed markets can do an amazing job solving optimization problems.
Trump forced all hospitals to be transparent about their prices, there’s no reason on this planet that the shit they’re peddling should cost the amount it does, and if the overhead is on the hospital then we need to regulate further up the ladder. The pharmaceutical companies and suppliers who are basically extorting everyone.
Over regulation is a bad thing, but some regulation, especially with an industry as corrupt as American healthcare is good.
What would be an example of giving the public sector much decision making power "relatively free from consequence?" Would this be the FCC in this context? I ask because I'm genuinely interested in the point your making. Is there a relationship between this and and opportunistic private sector? Would this be the cell carriers in this context?
"Blahous’s paper[2], titled “The Costs of a National Single-Payer Healthcare System,” estimates total national health expenditures. Even though his cost-saving estimates are more conservative than others, he acknowledges that Sanders’s “Medicare for All” plan would yield a $482 billion reduction in health care spending, and over $1.5 trillion in administrative savings, for a total of $2 trillion less in overall health care expenditures between 2022 and 2031, compared to current spending." [3]
[0] https://www.peri.umass.edu/publication/item/1127-economic-an...
[1] https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/12/medicare-for-all-study-pe...
[2] https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/blahous-costs-medicare...
[3] https://theintercept.com/2018/07/30/medicare-for-all-cost-he...
Here's how we could lower costs for Americans overnight: Allow importation of prescription medicines.
Medicare for all will lead to doctors for none. It's really hard to get appointments from places that accept Medicare, it's just not worth the hassle for many doctors to deal with them.
I just counted 62 Healthcare companies in the S&P 500. 5.1 trillion of lost revenue to those companies would be detrimental to the economy.
5.1T / 10 Years = .51T / Year
Current US Stock Market Cap: 153% of 21T = 53T [0][1]
.51T of 53T = 0.9%
For reference; the 2000s bubble had the stock market decrease by 36% over 3 years, the 2008 bubble 45% over 2 years [0].
I'd say "tank the economy" is an overstatement. I'm glad to be shown otherwise _with sources_
There are many serious people in Washington talking about the universal healthcare, just not many talking about government takeover of providers.
So you have a highly regulated free market that is neither a free market nor does it have the advantages of complete regulation similar to Europe. It just ends up being a really inefficient system.
It's a very US problem where we somehow managed to get the worst of both worlds.
Another analogy I like to give blind conservatives has to do with referees in their favorite sport. Yes, you don't love referees, but when they are doing a good job and seem to be calling it squarely, you know the overall game is better for have their involvement.
It helps but orthodoxy is hard to break.
Efficient Market Hypothesis[0]: "The efficient-market hypothesis was developed by Eugene Fama who argued that stocks always trade at their fair value, making it impossible for investors to either purchase undervalued stocks or sell stocks for inflated prices. As such, it should be impossible to outperform the overall market through expert stock selection or market timing, and that the only way an investor can possibly obtain higher returns is by chance or by purchasing riskier investments."
Investment theory of party competition [1]: "[...] if voters cannot bear the cost of becoming informed about public affairs they have little hope of successfully supervising government."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient-market_hypothesis
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investment_theory_of_party_com...
As an example, I used to work for financial traders. The exchanges were in key ways extremely free markets; anybody with the dough could buy the commodities they wanted quickly, cheaply, and easily. But the exchanges self-regulated very strongly. It was very clear to everybody at the company that making an exchange mad was Very Bad; rules had to be followed. And even getting allowed to trade on the exchange was a difficult and complicated process.
Rather the GoP whose rhetoric talks about free markets, is really just all about picking winners themselves and legislating profits for their allies.
In order to create any free market and foster competition, an entity has to decide and then enforce the rules for the market, which allows that entity to pick a winner by the rules it choose to write and then enforce.
Plus, in mature markets, fostering competition is antithetical to maintaining the "freeness" of the market, because it requires punishing the "winners" in order to ensure competitors, by things like breaking up competitors that are able to leverage winning in one area to compete and then win in another area (ie antitrust/antimonopoly), invalidating patents/trade secrets/intellectual property/etc. when ever something is so dominant that without access to it no one can compete, and limiting how competitors can compete (eg preventing them from limiting how purchasers can use their products).
And of course, every decision made for how to implement the kinds of issues outlined in the above paragraph is an opportunity to pick who wins, too.
And over time even a single, small benefit can be enough to guarantee a specific rational actor will win out over its competitors.
Certainly not in all cases, but if the issue you have is that individual decisions aren't enough to pick a winner, no matter how large/important, then change the last paragraph to
>>> And of course, every decision made for how to implement the kinds of issues outlined in the above paragraph is an opportunity to pick whom to give an advantage over their competitors, too.
And this doesn't even begin to consider the issue that since the mechanism for making and enforcing the rules exists within the system of rules it creates, both fostering competition and enforcing a free market give opportunities for competitors to buy rules and/or enforcement of rules that benefit them at the expense of competitors, either directly or indirectly.
I can say in a given industry they can't pull some bait and switch... a company that relies on that tacit could go out of business, is that picking winners or regulating poor behavior?
Like anything working to maintain some level of competitiveness would be like hitting a moving target, you'll have to change what you do, address barrier of entry issues one day, who knows what next.
And yes, regulating poor behavior is absolutely picking winners/picking losers/picking specific companies to disadvantage/advantage, and not just because of issues with uneven enforcement. Determining which behaviors are disallowed and which behaviors will be policed by "natural market forces", especially when talking about modifying rules for a preexisting market, means picking winners/losers/who gets advantaged/disadvantaged. This is why encouraging/fostering competition is antithetical to making/maintaining a free market.
You also can't bring a non-iOS/Android phone to their network (aside from iPhones, all devices must be purchased through them).
I plan on buying a Librem 5 when they are released; I will have to switch carriers and pay more every month, but freedom is worth the price.
But for my parents, paying just $7/line in taxes and then 20-30 dollars per month for data is well worth it, even after factoring in the expensive upgrades from the old S8+/Note 7 to their S9+/Note 9 (and yes, the S8+/Note 7 would have worked perfectly fine on their network if not for their asinine restrictions).
The more I age, the more I recognize these things aren't absolute and recognize that the levels of benefit/harm are often nuanced to specific situations and wouldn't use such a broad brush strokes of "only" and "always" (as opposed to recognizing a pattern).
Make it illegal, make it illegal for telecoms to allow it.