This is all true, but I am guessing the article skipped it because rising healthcare costs likely impact Gen Z much less than the population overall.
Obamacare has allowed children to stay on their parent's insurance for much longer. All of Gen Z is still young enough to qualify for that, so as a generation they haven't felt the full cost of seeking insurance independently. Plus the overturning of the personal mandate means young people are once again free to simply not get insurance which is often a bad decision overall, but can end up saving a healthy young adult some money.
There is still something very wrong with the healthcare system in the US, it just isn't a problem that has hit Gen Z particularly hard yet.
Is there a country you would point to as a good model for free market healthcare? Because healthcare seems like a market prone to be abused by market forces because the demand for it is often inelastic.
For example, the free market price for insulin is basically infinite because type 1 diabetics need a constant supply of it or else they die. Judging by the price of insulin in the US compared to our peer nations, it seems like the US's problem is too free of a market rather than it being too restricted.
>For example, the free market price for insulin is basically infinite because type 1 diabetics need a constant supply of it or else they die.
I've been to places in the Philippines where all available water is either on private property or being sold by private vendors. The price of water did not go to infinity, in fact you could buy a 1L bottle for something like 10 pesos, which is like $0.20. I'm not so sure a free market for necessities results in infinite price. If the price were truly near-infinite the entire economy of workers and capital would flock to it in seek of infinite profits and competition would become fierce.
>I've been to places in the Philippines where all available water is either on private property or being sold by private vendors. The price of water did not go to infinity, in fact you could buy a 1L bottle for something like 10 pesos, which is like $0.20.
The "basically" there was meant to show that I was being somewhat facetious. There are of course other factors at play. First the supplier wants to maximize profit and not price. The highest price doesn't necessarily yield the highest profit if it prices some people out of the market. Also a small group can't maintain a monopoly over a necessity required by a large group without facing a literal revolt. However when the group being taken advantage of is small, resistance becomes much more difficult to achieve. It is a lot easier to oppress the 0.5% of the population that is a type 1 diabetic than the 100% of the population that needs water.
>If the price were truly near-infinite the entire economy of workers and capital would flock to it in seek of infinite profits and competition would become fierce.
This would depend on some basic Economics 101 assumptions being true such as a commodity product in an industry with low barrier to entry and no economies of scale. Those assumptions rarely hold in the real world, especially in healthcare.
That leads to the same question I asked in the other comment chain. If you think the costs of the US healthcare are caused by the market being too regulated, doesn't that imply that you think cheaper markets are freer markets? Would you say that almost all of our peer nations take a more free market approach to healthcare than the US?
> If you think the costs of the US healthcare are caused by the market being too regulated
Yes
>doesn't that imply that you think cheaper markets are freer markets?
No. Example: You could imprison slaves and pick cotton, that doesn't mean the cheaper cotton is result of a free market, because it is predicated on force rather than voluntary exchange.
>Would you say that almost all of our peer nations take a more free market approach to healthcare than the US?
An interesting question. Possibly yes, possibly no, but forcing the tax for it under the gun of the tax man is a big strike against it being a free market, in any nation that taxes universally for it. I would have to contrast that against the gun of the regulator in the US effectively forcing the provider and consumer to follow their onerous constraints. One could make the argument that an otherwise unregulated but universal healthcare system might be considered a freer market, but I don't know enough about these other nations to say which ones that may be.
> You could imprison slaves and pick cotton, that doesn't mean the cheaper cotton is result of a free market, because it is predicated on force rather than voluntary exchange.
Isn't regulation against slavery inherently a restriction of a free market? There is obviously violent coercion baked into it, but from an economic perspective, it is basically an elimination of minimum wage which is an artificial limitation on the market.
> Possibly yes, possibly no, but forcing the tax for it under the gun of the tax man is a big strike against it being a free market, in any nation that taxes universally for it. I would have to contrast that against the gun of the regulator in the US effectively forcing the provider and consumer to follow their onerous constraints. One could make the argument that an otherwise unregulated but universal healthcare system might be considered a freer market, but I don't know enough about these other nations to say which ones that may be.
But whether the funding comes from public or private sources is not what most defines a free market. That comes from competition between buyers and sellers. I view US healthcare as more free market because buyers aren't nearly as limited. Many other countries restrict the market by centralizing purchasing through the government. This distortion of the free market gives the buyers more power which can result in lower negotiated prices. It isn't that healthcare markets in other countries are less regulated that makes them cheaper. It is that they are regulated in specific ways to make sure they are cheaper.
>Isn't regulation against slavery inherently a restriction of a free market? There is obviously violent coercion baked into it, but from an economic perspective, it is basically an elimination of minimum wage which is an artificial limitation on the market.
What? Slavery = free market? Are you serious? Free market has voluntary exchange. I'd like you to apologize for deliberately debating in bad faith, otherwise we can just stop here.
>it [slavery] is basically an elimination of minimum wage which is an artificial limitation on the market.
Someone as intelligent as you doesn't need to be explained this, but I will feed the troll for a moment and make it obvious:
Free market:
A: OK bob, we're setting your wage to zero. Make sure to hit production today.
B: Nah fuck off, EvilCo down the street will pay me 20 Wulans an hour, but my daughter might volunteer for free to work with the CapitalistFuckwad Engineering division on a charity project to help with her college application.
Slavery:
A: OK bob, we're setting your wage to zero. Make sure to hit production today. We'll be changing the code to the cage for your children today, so if you don't hit production we'll be auctioning them off without telling you the code.
B: Yes sire, can I tickle your balls as well in exchange for you allowing to see my wife for 5 minutes in the conjugal visit cage?
A: Great, our labor prices and price to consumers are so much lower now than back when we were called CapitalistFuckwad enterprises and the dopes working for us could actually walk away when we tried paying them zero. Bob's daughter's charity work was great so I can't wait to use the cattle prod to entice her to work on the real meat and potatoes.
>What? Slavery = free market? Are you serious? Free market has voluntary exchange. I'd like you to apologize for deliberately debating in bad faith, otherwise we can just stop here.
Do you think healthcare is always a voluntary exchange? Because a type 1 diabetic has exactly the same choice in whether to participate in the insulin market as a slave does in the labor market. Either they participate or they die. Once you say slavery can't be considered part of a free market, isn't that an admission that lifesaving healthcare also can't be part of a free market?
If you are still demanding an apology, that is an answer to my question and an indication that you don't see the same ethical problem I do in pricing otherwise healthy people out of lifesaving medication.
It's also probably an indication I think it's great to suck the blood out of innocent kittens and that I worship a portrait of a pentagram. Have fun making whatever accusation you want, they'll be left undefended.
Sure, but they have their own FDA equivalent with their own regulations. Why are the regulations in the US more harmful than the regulations elsewhere?
Many of those issues are not specific to the US. So are you arguing for doing away with drug patents or something? That is rarely an argument I see from someone praising free markets.
Warning about above poster: they believe slavery is free-market.
Of course people active in free-market discussion know that patents as government imposed forced monopoly against people that never entered a contract with the "patent-holder" are staunchly opposed by many free market thinkers, including individuals such as Murray Rothbard. Again in SLG's bad-faith quest to make free-markets about slavery and monopolies, he uses his exceptional intelligence in attempts to trick the naive reader into a false view about free markets.
> countries in which insulin is cheaper have a healthcare industry that is a freer market than the US?
Here we see the fallacious slight of hand, where OP attempts to deceive audience by using PRICE OF A SINGLE GOOD to measure whether THE ENTIRE MARKET OF HEALTHCARE is "freer."
>Again in SLG's bad-faith quest to make free-markets about slavery and monopolies,
Yeah, I'm the one acting in bad faith...
My comment about patents was because in the US political sphere "free market" and is often code for "pro-business" so I was checking which meaning WalterBright was using.
I'm not so sure that is a sensible inference to draw. Government "interference" in healthcare in many countries where citizens both have greater access and report more satisfaction with the healthcare service they receive.
Also, free markets really don't have much to say for people who don't have the money to trade in that market, and in the healthcare space, denying treatment to people just because they can't afford treatment can cause some massive negative externalities. Just imagine how bad it would be if there was a massive pandemic and only the rich could afford vaccines; there would be so many unvaccinated hosts for that virus that new variants would keep emerging and significantly harm the quality of life for everyone.
Also, market efficiencies are largely a product of the ability of the consumer to compare the price and quality of different services. When the government is the consumer, it A) can afford to allocate this task to a few experts (rather than demand the entire population learn how to evaluate the cost and efficacy of medical treatments), B) can use its monopsony power to negotiate prices, and C) can use its treatment and outcome data to identify opportunities to do preventative maintenance rather than the more expensive (in both life and money) emergency care.
I'm more sympathetic to free markets than most, but healthcare is arguably the sector where free markets would produce the worst outcomes.
First off, the US healthcare market wasn't a free market in 1968. State licensing boards regulated the supply of doctors and as Milton Friedman argued in his book "Free to Choose", powerful interest groups used the US court system to impose massive costs on unlicensed healthcare practitioners; "The AMA has engaged in extensive litigation charging chiropractors and osteopathic physicians with the unlicensed practice of medicine, in an attempt to restrict them to as narrow an area as possible." [0]. So no, even before Medicare and Medicaid, there wasn't a free market for healthcare in the US.
Still, in that time, there was much less government involvement in healthcare and the stats show significant improvement after the implementation of the SSA of 1965 Act. Infant mortality fell from over 2.5% in the early 1960s to just over half a percent now [1], with the decrease accelerating in the late 1960's before tapering in the 1980's. Life expectancy also jolted upward in the late 1960's [1].
Healthcare has increased in cost significantly since the time before Medicare and Medicaid, when the treatment for a heart attack was to lay in a hospital bed and wait to die, whereas now, we have much better treatments that can add decades on to people's lives. [2]
And regarding the pandemic hypothesis, there's so much evidence to support my claims. If vaccine shots hadn't been made free to individuals, uptake would have been far slower and life would be far worse as the death rate would be much higher than the (still horrifying) ~500 people per day.
> First off, the US healthcare market wasn't a free market in 1968
Yes, there was still some government interference that made it less of a free market. The beauty of the free market, however, is the closer it is to a free market the better it works. It's pointless to nitpick over just where the line is.
Healthcare outcomes in the US improved throughout the 20th century. There wasn't a magical change in the 1960s. The major government interference started in 1968, and your reference shows things improving throughout the 1960s.
> If vaccine shots hadn't been made free to individuals, uptake would have been far slower
An assumption without evidence. People don't appreciate things they get for free. In fact, the free vaccines seems to have engendered suspicion of the vaccine and lots of resistance to it. I've often suspected that charging for it would have increased vaccination rates.
Besides, in a free market, nothing whatsoever impedes any charity from giving out free stuff.
That said, I'd argue that vaccination against highly infectious diseases is a special case that suggests government involvement as a public good.
I would take straight up communism health care or ancap pay-or-die unregulated over our current bastardized system that combines the worst aspects of both.
Really? I remember a thread on reddit about the HBO series Chernobyl. A lot of posters who lived through it commented. One I recall said that root canals were free in the USSR, but you didn't get any anesthetic. Another commented that the hospital stay was free, but you had to bribe the nurses to take care of you.
Having had a root canal myself, it's "no thanks" to free communist health care.
Obamacare has allowed children to stay on their parent's insurance for much longer. All of Gen Z is still young enough to qualify for that, so as a generation they haven't felt the full cost of seeking insurance independently. Plus the overturning of the personal mandate means young people are once again free to simply not get insurance which is often a bad decision overall, but can end up saving a healthy young adult some money.
There is still something very wrong with the healthcare system in the US, it just isn't a problem that has hit Gen Z particularly hard yet.