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Comment by jamesrom | Hacker News Reader

> We already have an extreme shortage of available healthcare workers. We don't need to stress them further because 20% of the population suddenly decides they need 80 elective surgeries to remove things that would've gone away or stayed benign on their own.

Strawman. No one is suggesting adding extra stress to healthcare workers. It's also not you or your doctors call to make: let's gatekeep this patients cancer because our hospital can't deal with the workload. What a truly wicked idea.

To help alleviate the extreme shortage of available healthcare workers we should instead allow those wanting to pay for these elective surgeries, to pay for them! Drive money into healthcare, scale up treatments, drive money into research. Let the system work.

Don't just turn off the lights and shut the door.

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It's significantly more wicked to pretend that tests, treatments, and more aren't done by healthcare workers (yes, even private ones), and to inundate them with unimportant medical procedures while truly sick people are dying.

Yes, this is true even if the person opting for the elective surgery has millions, potentially even billions of dollars to pay with. Having money doesn't make your illness more important.

Don't get all holier-than-thou on topics like this; it's already a difficult-enough topic.

I often wonder if people who make these kinds of statements simply don't know how market forces work, or if they know how market forces work but just choose to pretend they don't exist in certain contexts where that reality feels particularly unfair...

Demand suppression doesn't work. "Having money doesn't make your illness more important" sounds like a noble sentiment, but by applying it in the real world you'd actually be reducing the total size of the pool of resources available to treat everyone. Talk about holier than thou...

Of course I know how market forces work. They are not the only forces we can manage. They are not the only levers we can pull. Economics are cool, but not almighty. There is no scenario in which a hospital gets extra profit, and turns around and simply reduces the cost for those in need. No - no additional resources are being removed. That's not how hospitals work.

TaLk aBoUt hOlIeR ThAn tHoU....

You claim to know, yet you still make statements that are obviously foolish given said knowledge? Imagine applying this logic to other industries:

> The existence of folding phones inundates phone manufactures with orders for devices with unimportant luxury features when there are people who are struggling to afford even a basic entry level phone. Having money doesn't make your needs more important. We should ban folding phones to make entry-level phones more accessible to poor people.

Do you agree the paragraph above is unreasonable and that trying to implement it in the real world would make things worse for everyone? If so, why did you just propose the same thing for medical care a couple comments back?

That's what I'm so curious about; I see this all the time where when the subject matter is emotionally or politically charged people revert to this "there's a fixed-sized pie and I want to make sure I get a big piece" economic model, even while appearing in other contexts to understand that that's not how things work.

> It's significantly more wicked to pretend that tests, treatments, and more aren't done by healthcare workers (yes, even private ones), and to inundate them with unimportant medical procedures while truly sick people are dying.

Strawman+ad hominem. No one is suggesting to pretend _anything_. Charge premiums for these tests based on how "unimportant" they are. Use market forces to move money from those willing to pay, to those who cannot.

Actually neither - you were suggesting that money makes the problem valid. It doesn't. You can charge all you want - it either becomes useless (why are we trying to find ways to get more profit to hospitals???) or it reduces the staff who are better suited to go somewhere else.

This is an unbelievably inefficient way to try and move money to those who need it. The market correction should be elsewhere.

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