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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   30231 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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There are specific arguments you can make for healthcare being uniquely susceptible to market failure, because the demand side is willing to pay a potentially infinite price and the combination of this with patents means that it is rife for extortion.

This needn't necessarily be a leftward critique that denounces capitalism. You can perfectly make a powerful critique of how corrupt and inefficient the American healthcare system is from the right. Since it's all ultimately enabled by State action.

Does the fact that this is insurance, rather than, say, a drug company make a difference in that?

(I do agree that there are a bunch of ways that our health care system is bad.)

I recall that mutualists specifically criticize for-profit insurance as a concept because it creates hazardous incentives.

Consider that the path that maximizes profit as an insurer is not the one where you faithfully execute your contract, but the one where you create as many possible obstacles to its faithful execution short of doing something illegal, or, well, getting shot down by disgruntled clients.

Unfortunatly the complexity of healthcare creates many situations where this kind of dynamic is a problem, and it's not unique to the insurance model at all (I can think of quite a few ways this applies to the NHS for instance) but I think there is indeed something potentially uniquely sinister about the bureaucracy that has to make the technical decision of whether or not your life is ruined, and may benefit if it is.

I feel like I also need to mention that the converse argument, about the problem with rules that are too loose and let some people leech from the commons and/or control prices in ways that create shortages is also a valid one, even though it's less sympathetic.

Fair. I imagine offering a good product would probably be a good selling point for an insurance company, but that might not hold up if there's not enough competition (see, especially, if it's provided by workplaces), or if consumers prospectively (rather than looking back) prefer lower prices and better-sounding promises to actually good coverage.

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