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Comment by roc | Hacker News Reader

The real point to them being elective luxuries is that the would-be consumer can actually walk away entirely. You needn't get lazik from anyone. The same can't be said of many/most medical procedures.

You can't research the market and just skip getting a knee replacement altogether, the way you could with lazik. To say nothing of more serious problems.

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The consumer also can't entirely walk away from the food market. That doesn't make food prices go out of control.

Which would be a great point if not for the oversight, subsidies, reserves and incentives that affect staple foods.

The point is that consumers are still able to bid down prices despite having no choice but to participate in the market. Individual sellers still have to convince individual buyers to buy their products, and to do so they have to price their goods competitively. It doesn't matter that there is no alternative to participating in the food market because there are alternatives within the food market.

According to USDA in 2011 15% of US households suffered from food insecurity - for them they are already out of control.

And there are the other couple of billion people on the planet that cannot afford a dollar per day for a meal.

> 15% of US households suffered from food insecurity

...partly because of healthcare costs, which is the number one cause of bankruptcy in the US. You're making our point.

They're not out of control, those people just happen to be very poor. They haven't been going up like crazy like health care costs have.

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