Comment by oatmeal1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by oatmeal1 | Hacker News Reader

It's ironic for him to suggest government-run healthcare when it doesn't benefit from the #1 best coordinator of resources on the planet - price. He accidentally highlights the reason we have so many coordination failures - smart people with little wisdom think they can solve every problem, using other people's money, with no consequences for their failure.

Not everyone should get free college, and not every house should have fiber optic cable. We have the opportunity to fix all easily fixable issues if we let go of our ego, and admit how our conceited actions have caused the coordination failures we see today. We absolutely will not achieve a better future by continuing the exact same self-aggrandizing approach to problem solving that brought us here, where we think every problem is simple, that our morality is above reproach, and that by the stroke of a pen we can alleviate any ill.

“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design." - Hayek

> when it doesn't benefit from the #1 best coordinator of resources on the planet - price

Price is arguably #1 in info-symmetric non-urgent elastic demand situations.

Which portions of health care function this way is left as an exercise for the reader.

I'm not advocating against health insurance in general, as you are suggesting.

As I understand it, the US government pays more per capita for healthcare than any other rich country. And Americans don't even get free healthcare in return.

I'm not sure what the solution is either, but the status quo ain't it.

https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2...

> Health spending per person in the U.S. was nearly two times higher than in the closest country, Germany, and four times higher than in South Korea.

Any idea that the US is a even any kind of approximation of a free market is ridiculous. Any study of the history of US health care makes this quite clear.

That not to see that such a system would be better then some other systems, we don't really have good evidence as no major country has developed this way. There were some early interesting developments for patterns of care in the US before the current system became the dominate re-enforced system.

Its also not really clear if the US switched system to something like those countries, that it could achieve the same costs. Such a reorganization would be monumental in scale requiring an US bureaucracy of a scale only matched by the US Armed Forces.

Its not a problem I would want to be in charge of solving.

Price absolutely still exists in government run health care… do you have any idea how it actually works in developed countries?

PP is referring to the price mechanism of markets. Not an arbitrary set price set by a regulator / central planner.

By definition if government runs a sector, there can be no pricing mechanism. Otherwise the government isn’t running it; it’s just a market.

The government is the payer, hospitals and doctors can still compete in pricing.

Plenty of US states have an effective duopoly of healthcare insurers, which is no different in effect from having a single payer.

The main difference is with for profit insurers, some % is skimmed off the top as profit instead of going into patient care.

He's probably referring to price controls, which basically everyone else has.

The US effectively has price controls by way of insurance company mandated charge books.

Price exists. Information that is embedded in the price, or, more precisely, in the myriad of market interactions that, among other things, also create the prices, however, is often lost. Or replaced with other information - e.g. who has a the better lobbyist or can negotiate with the government officials more efficiently. Also, it seems that you are implying there's a single "way it works in developed countries" - if you do, you are seriously mistaken, there are a wide variety of ways and each one has its own set of issues.

Can we do this with defense budget instead of healthcare? I don’t mind paying taxes for universal healthcare.

Defense spending is roughly half of what the federal government already spends on healthcare.

If all you've got is a hammer then every problem begins to resemble a nail. But some problems actually require a screwdriver.

The problem with price signals in health care is that they compete with survival signals, and the survival signals sometimes win out.

This makes health care an example of a situation where (traditional) markets become distorted and fail to operate efficiently. A little external help is needed.

Damn this got downvoted so hard. HN needs less js frameworks and more basic economics (so I'd recommend basic economics by Thomas Sowell as a start)

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