Can we call it a cartel market instead of private markets?
The various healthcare leaders use their wealth to strengthen their position through laws.
Most sectors cannot operate like US medical, they are their own beast.
The various healthcare leaders use their wealth to strengthen their position through laws.
Most sectors cannot operate like US medical, they are their own beast.
Everyone who can does that. Laws and politics aren't a separate magisterium from business; there are no hard borders here.
That one difference is all that matters.
As a businessman, as much as you can direct the behavior of both your customers and your employees, you can influence the lawmakers. After all, they too want money or things that money can buy.
Violence is just one side of the coin that is power. The other side is voluntary (or technically voluntary but not quite) participation, which is primarily controlled by money. That's what makes politics and markets intertwined.
The doctor runs credit on you before providing treatment, and because of this erroneous bankruptcy that you may not even know about(credit reports can only be reviewed once per year), you are placed in the hallway instead of being given a private bay despite the increased risk of infection. The hospital wanted to make room for paying customers, you see.
So while it's natural to want to "sell" to "profitable customers" in this case applying free market principals to this makes a complete mockery of our health care system. And given the credit bureaus' track records of high inaccuracy and difficulty in disputing the reports, you're likely to get poorer treatment inexplicably, and entirely by accident.
Street lights? Police and Fire protection? Water access?
I remember there was a big outrage about Martin Shkreli's actions. Meanwhile the CEOs of these companies probably get lauded in business magazines.
Calling these miserable, greedy, selfish bastards out for what they are could be a first step. God, how I'm hoping for a socialist revolution to take place within my lifetime...
We've seen that this is something that absolutely doesn't work. They (that's the people who matter) just find a scapegoat and everyone else carries on just as before. Shkreli ended up in prison, but Valeant is still busy making profit off the backs of patients, and despite Hillary Clinton's professed outrage prices for such drugs as Syprine haven't gone down a penny. Netflix has a documentary on the case.
Where is the revolution? Where is single-payer healthcare?
Americans are getting exactly what they voted for.
Also, let's be clear about one more thing. Martin Shkreli is not a free market capitalist, he's a crony. Leveraging state patent systems to create abusive monopolies is not free market capitalism, that is textbook crony capitalism and the enemy of a free market. Without arbitrary state enforcement of medical patents on insulin and epipens, do you think that these would be exceedingly expensive items? Are you being bankrupted by Benadryl? Hardly.
There are absolutely elements of healthcare that are far better serviced by a command economy than a free market, and I think the weird hybrid system in the US is the worst of both worlds in many such cases. But a socialist revolution? Socialism is an authoritarian nightmare that cannot suitably answer any question related to scarcity or competence.
As for "socialism", again you're disagreeing on definitions. To most Americans, Sweden, Norway, Canada, etc. are "socialist".
As far as definitions go, my definition of "socialism" is actual socialism, not social democracy. This quote is overused at this point, but Danish PM Rasmussen explicitly clarifies "I know that some people in the US associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism. Therefore I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy." Adding central planning to ameliorate some of the rough edges of market economies does not create a socialist state.
Again, most Americans will disagree with you. The definition of a word is whatever most people agree it is.
>This quote is overused at this point, but Danish PM Rasmussen explicitly clarifies
No one in Denmark has any authority to define a word in the English language as used by Americans.
>Adding central planning to ameliorate some of the rough edges of market economies does not create a socialist state.
According to Americans, it absolutely does.
>So no, free market capitalism is not indistinguishable from crony capitalism.
Again, according to many Americans it is.
Here's a challenge for you: pick out 100 different rural counties across America. Go to each county, and take a poll, asking them, "Is Denmark a socialist country?" I guarantee you that a clear majority of those polled will answer "yes".
Just try having a conversation with the average American voter (esp. in rural districts) about "socialism" vs. "social democracy" vs. whatever, and see how far you get. They're probably going to say Denmark is "socialist" because they saw it on Fox News. But these are the people electing the leadership here (or about half of it anyway). We have two "sides", and even many on your side probably would have a hard time with these concepts. It's no wonder things are so broken here, and I don't see how it can get better any time soon when the two sides can't even have a rational discussion because they can't even agree on basic language or concepts.