That's an idiotic suggestion, to privatize healthcare completely.
That was the way our medical system was for over 140 years before the New Deal fucked it to hell and gone. Worked very well for it's era. Nothing stopping us from doing it again, except politicians intent on power over us. Controlling healthcare controls the populace.
Secondly you are assuming I am proposing to strip away all the advances made in consumer protection, weights and measures, truth in advertising, anti-trust/monopoly, anti-fraud and other similar types of government regulation that ARE useful. I am not saying that for one second. I am saying government needs to be utterly and completely removed from the administration of healthcare or involvement in the doctor patient relationship beyond criminal aspects that may exist.
Let doctors charge as much as they want.
We should.
You seem to think that all doctors do is pull numbers out of their ass on no basis for pricing. What is the basis for pricing medical services? Do you even consider this? Do you know how? They actually teach professionals how to do this in college.
1. Consider your educational costs. It took a lot of time and money for you to get to be a doctor. This time has a monetary cost, most often it still needs to be repaid in the form of MASSIVE student loans that can take as much time as a mortgage to repay. If you are thinking this shouldn't be a factor in your bill, tell your local medical college to drop ITS rates. After all, college tuition has been rising faster than 4 times the rate of inflation for almost 15 years, with little to no reason.
2. Consider your facilities. If you're Dr. Fleischer in Cicily, Alaska with no real equipment, or facilities beyond a clinic that's a glorified office filled with sick people... your expenses are low. But if you are Dr. House in Princeton, NJ with multi million dollar equipment you must pay for and pay off over time... you have much higher expenses.
3. Consider your patients. You cannot charge so much that nobody can risk coming to you, or will never be able to pay. You will go out of business pricing yourself out of the market. Therefore you must consider the first two aspects in the mix with this aspect on how much you can charge. If all your patients are welfare cases or working on the farm or in a local saw mill or mine, they are going to be generally poor and you can't rack up services that cost an arm and a leg. Nor should you offer them here. They will need to go to a specialist in a better market that can support the equipment and treatment or another facility to handle more than general practice issues.
4. Now compile your base monthly costs and per patient rate. Just like making a home budget, pile all your expenses together, and what you need to pay to pay them off at a reasonable rate PLUS what you need to survive on. Then you divide that by the expected traffic to you. THAT sets your base price. It's fair and provides you with the necessary funds to stay in business and with a roof over your head. As things get better or worse, you can flex your prices appropriately.
ALL professionals do this. All of them in some form or another. There is NOTHING wrong with it. It is basic economics. Now if greed bites someone in the ass and they are sick of seeing snotty nose kids for 20 buck visits, fine. Crank up the price and become the specialist that deals in sports medicine where all you do is scope knees and ankles. Your business will drop precipitously to only those who need your services which in the wrong market may be never, or be fine if you are in a big city and a constant flow of amateur and professional sportsmen pass through your doors.
Basic economics. This occurs even when corporations run the hospital. It happens even when government is in charge... except they don't have to ever worry about running their business into the ground. Why? Because if they screw up? They can tax you to cover their asses. So they get sloppy, and expensive where a business NEVER could. When you have competition, you have the ability to NOT patronize someone who is overcharging or providing bad service or are just out and out morons trying to robbing you. If all are managed by the government... you have nowhere to run to, and they don't have to care if you're being served properly because they can get more tax money from you at gunpoint (the IRS) to cover any losses.
In the meantime, let's privatize police. And roads. And schools. Great idea.
Yes. yes it is. There has been only one government program in history that I loved what they did. The US Railroad Agency. They did one outstanding thing with creating standardized motive power for railroads during 2 major wars... and then it went away because it's job was done!
Private schools perform better, and have greater accountability. Private police can work just fine. Cities can contract out the enforcement of their laws and demand the same level of accountability and compliance for less than any municipal system. If they have problems, they can FIRE the police management company, and bring in a new one that will do the job better. Corporations do this with security companies all the time. Same can be done for education systems. But the unions don't want that because then they can't protect the incompetent and their now useless positions as union administrators.
Not advocating it. I am a student of history and have read books on the guilded age and the anarchist (communists) of the 1890's to it's peak under Woodrow Wilson's 'progressivism' and through the 1930's and its collapse with the fall of Nazi Germany. This was a time of great adaptation to industrial life that had to be done by society to survive. Look at India and China and other Asian nations. They have not gone through these trials yet and have not yet had the reformers listened to on a mass scale in government to produce a modern western style capitalist society as they are on the arc to do. Nobody thinks this is good.
The 16/6/365 work years are a bad thing. In NYC they used to have to fight the residents of tenements to cut air shafts and windows through the buildings to allow oxygen into the inner cores of these massive internal slums, cutting holes in buildings to prevent suffocation from LACK OF OXYGEN to inner rooms! Nobody's advocating returning to these times personified by Sinclare and Riis. Nobody wants the robber barons to return and repeats of the Teapot Dome scandal, the trusts and monopolies.
The question is how wide should the road be for capitalism. Is it going to be a single tight ally where one vehicle can pass at a time at rare points, or a superhighway 10 lanes wide where hundreds of thousands of vehicles can pass through quickly and safely and get to where they need to go. Currently, medical care is being shoved into a thin alley with NO ability to even turn around.
This is the 21st century. We need to walk away from the methods of the 19th century socialism wants us to return to.
Just what made the big automakers come back to uncle sam with their hands out, when they played too rough.
Well, that's what happens when socialist pantywaists run corporations. They think that Uncle Sugar is obligated to save them from themselves and once they are picked up, booboos cleaned off and they've gotten a kiss to make it better, they can go back to what hurt themselves in the first place! No, they should have failed, been broken up and bought up by their competitors. Then we wouldn't have seen the unions bailed out to continue doing what helped create the disaster. We would see Detroit potentially start to improve instead of languishing as a socialist mess. They need to suffer the consequences of their bad decision just like every household and small business in this nation.
Your issue is the double standard. In that you need to get some more understanding from other philosophical sources.
