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Comment by jdminhbg | Hacker News Reader

> the US healthcare system ... a completely free market

I have read a lot of wrong things on HN, ranging from the merely misinformed to the willfully ignorant, but this might take the cake.

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The sentence you're objecting to isn't claiming that US healthcare is a completely free market (which, as you note, would be an unbelievably ignorant view to hold... literally unbelievably). It's claiming that certain failures of the fairly-free US system already illustrate the sorts of failures that would plague a free(er) system.

You may or may not agree with that conclusion, but it's a far more plausible view for someone to hold than what you seem to have thought the original poster meant.

"US healthcare system is in fact a perfect demonstration of the dangers of a completely free market"

The commenter actually says exactly that...that the US healthcare system is (in fact) a perfect demonstration of a completely free market.

No, it is a comment about the idea that the failures come from it not being free enough.

Saying that something demonstrates the dangers of x by saying that the things that are wrong with it are features of it moving in the direction of x is not the same as saying that the thing is x.

I could say that something nearly catching fire and getting badly scorched is a perfect demonstration of the dangers of fire, but that would not mean that I think that the thing has actually caught fire, it just means that I am using a perfectly normal rhetorical device to describe that I think that the fire is a danger.

The part you quoted doesn't support your argument, re-read it and then disagree with what was actually claimed if you'd like.

OP:

"perfect demonstration of the dangers of a completely free market"

You:

"perfect demonstration of a completely free market"

Do you see where the difference is?

You are selectively re-arranging my words to create a different meaning. At no point did I say the US healthcare system was completely free.

"Today's Instagram outage is a perfect example of the dangers of hosting all your services on your own hardware."

...

"I never said Instagram hosts their own services!"

What the hell? He really didn't say that. It really does look like you chopped up his comment to make a fake comment to argue against.

Hint: if a half-dozen different people misinterpret your point, it's not them, it's you.

That also largely depends on if they are being wilfully obtuse, or lack the basic comprehension skills involved with recognising wider context beyond the level of single sentences, which seem to be the main two areas of confusion here so far.

Half a dozen is pretty easy to hit when you have such a wide variety of people readying your post online. What would be the percentage threshold be?

So many unnecessary arguments crop up on this forum because of selective, incomplete reading of comments and misinterpretation.

If commenters took a minute to think about other potential meanings before going off on some misinformed rant it might make for a more productive debate.

Then again pigs might one day fly.

What could nikatwork have changed about the original comment in order to make the intended meaning more clear here?

"It seems to me that the parlous semi-free market state of the US healthcare system is in fact a perfect demonstration of the dangers we'd encounter if we moved to a completely free market. Claims that "oh no it's not actually free enough" are merely handwaving"

I think that (or something like it) would have been a much clearer approach.

On the contrary, if a half-dozen different people don't misinterpret your point on a widely-read Internet forum, you probably didn't say anything worthwhile.

You are very clearly, and unambiguously declaring that as long as there are six people somewhere in the world who misunderstand, then whoever made the original point is at fault for not making it universally easy to understand, and impossible to twist or edit to fit the prejudices of the reader?

At what point does the number of people who correctly understand it come into play? If 6 people don't get it, but 6 people do, is it still the fault of the author? What about 60, 600, 6000, 6bn?

Surely if only six people out of the entire population of the world misinterpret a point, and everyone else gets it, then it must be the due to the prejudices or poor comprehension skills of those six.

I wonder if, perhaps, you could provide a counterargument to nikatwork.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_%28United_States%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicaid

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipaa

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_Protection_and_Affordab...

This is kind of like condescendingly asking someone to provide a counterargument to a proposition that the Earth is completely dry land.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_of_need

Those are insurers. The article is about the hospital supply market. In particular, the completely unregulated part of the hospital supply chain.

So.. are you merely misinformed, or willfully ignorant?

> The article is about the hospital supply market.

That's fine. The sentence I'm objecting to is about the US healthcare system.

Again: that is a sentence you made up. You ignored the "it is even more" clause, which makes it clear that he believes the current market dynamics presage what would happen in a deregulated market. What's worse, in order to "object" to the sentence, you deliberately misquoted the comment and attributed your broken misquote to him.

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