Hacker News Reader

Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>I'm always irritated when people blame capitalism and free markets for the high cost of healthcare in the USA. The reality is that healthcare is anything but a free market, and costs aren't going to come down until it becomes one.

Capitalism ain't nothing like a free market either, that's the point of those people.

Capitalism is large private interests, big corporations, elites, and government in bed together to milk the population.

As for the "free market", that's an impossible unicorn and ponies fantasy, formulated in the 18th century and perpetuated as a myth by economists who should know better afterwards.

View on HN

Free market is possible - the problem is that it is tool and not ideology. For it to work you need several conditions:

1. Relatively low barrier of entry 2. Non essential goods 3. Comoditization/semi comoditization of the products 4. Price, demand and supply elasticity

The android phone/ tablet marked in the developing world right now is perfect example. Cheap PCs in the 80s/90s.

Sadly in the developed world the business models with carrier subsidization is quite evil and hostile towards the consumers. We should really make the wireless and wired assholes dumb pipes.

You realize you've essentially state that a free market is not possible in health care, yes?

He explicitly states that in another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6040196

>Free market is possible - the problem is that it is tool and not ideology. For it to work you need several conditions: 1. Relatively low barrier of entry 2. Non essential goods 3. Comoditization/semi comoditization of the products 4. Price, demand and supply elasticity

I don't see how all those are possible.

They presuposse a place where:

1) There is no government intervention.

2) Private interests play nice to each other and never take advantage of their position to skew the market.

That might happen temporarily in some sub-market (e.g cheap PCs in the 80s/90s) but it absolutely cannot happen in the overall market. Even something like "patents" and "copyright" is enough to fuck this up. Not to mention the issues of raw materials, infrastructure (roads, etc), foreign dependencies, etc.

Which is why Adam Smith has a big section in "The wealth of nations" where he talks about the absolute necessity of government regulation to ensure smooth operation of the market and the necessity of building absolute divisions between business and government.

Mysteriously absent from most politicians free market tirades.

To be fair, a "market" is by definition trade under ENFORCED circumstances. Therefore a "free market" is in theory possible if the statutes of such a thing are the terms of governance.

Of course, there's no reason to believe the consequences of this are optimal or even desirable, though they're not necessarily worse than what exists now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com