Of course. That's a standard economic fact. But I do not think that argument should be in place for people who want to make healthcare more affordable.
Myabe not, but I don't see any real way to eliminate them. Like I tried to explain to Larkin supply and demand apply to pretty much anything that can be consumed. We have supply and demand curves to show us in a rudimentary way what will happen when various factors change within the market for healthcare. it makes it very simple to see what happens to supply when the price of something goes down. I don't know why Larkin won't acknowledge what is staring him directly in the face. Or perhaps the eary silence is enough, lol.
I don't think so. Government's track record of having lack of foresight is well documented. I don't believe at all that one could say "Well, if government creates a policy which would increase demand for healthcare, they are probably devising a similar plan to increase supply". I guess I just don't have the faith in the bloated government bureaucracy and criminals in Washington currently.
Now, you're not going to find many people on this board who believe that socialized medicine is a mistake more than me. However, I do think there are ways to decrease the costs of healthcare without the government sticking it's hand deeper in my pocket.
1) A change in the current malpractice industry. Doctors pay premiums on malpractice insurance which are through the roof -- I personally know doctors who pay well over 100k a year in malpractice insurance. Lessen that expense, and prices will decrease.
2) Lessen government regulation on healthcare. There are so many local, state and federal regulations on the healthcare industry that the costs of compliance are through the roof. Lessen that expense, and prices will decrease.
3) These decreases in prices have a snowball effect -- once you decrease prices slightly, a few more people will be able to afford health insurance. This will cause non-insured patients to default on healthcare debt less and less, which will in turn cause a further decrease in prices, and so on and so on.
There are many, many more ways to decrease costs. I have barely scratched the surface. But, as one can plainly see, there are solutions outside of socialized medicine.
To be somewhat fair I think the distinciton has to be made between socialized medicine and universal healthcare. I think Larkinn advocates something closer to full blown socialized medicine based on past conversations, but he can correct that if not true. Bascially what that would amount to is full blown, state run healthcare. Which ,as you said, given our governements beraucratic track record, seem like a really bad idea.
Universal healthcare on the other hand I think would simply supply some minimum form of access for all that assures when someone needs to be treated they can afford to be treated. There were still most lkely be a market for private insureance (which as you noted, also costs so much because of governmetn regulation) but that I woudl think would bring us back to teh same debate. Instead of complaining that someone gets healthcare only because they can pay for it and someone else doesn't cause they can't pay for it, now the complaint woudl be that someone is able to get 'better' healthcare because they can pay for it.
again I think at the end of the day the goal is to improve access to the resource, not so much reducing price. What good is a price reduction on something that you still don't have access to? That and access is really supply and as the law of supply demand says 'cet par' (all thing being eqaul) just reducing price doesn't change supply. So what the goall really, really is, is increasing the the supply of available resources.
In that vein maybe we have the best system possible already. I mean we are still able to treat an aweful lot of people and provide them with the best quality of care the world has to offer.