Comment by ambicapter
4 hours ago
The mandated low margin is part of the problem. When your margins are regulated, the only way to increase profits is to just make everything more expensive. More revenue, same margin, more profits. Humane health care is incompatible with free market economics.
Perhaps its not compatible. But that’s tangential to the situation in the US, at the very minimum you need to have price transparency in any ‘free market’ system.
I think the point is that we might as well just give up the pretense of a free market healthcare solution and just focus on what's humane.
Is it humane to leave a patient to die in an ambulance when a single-payer nationalized healthcare system is over capacity?
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/apr/06/englands-nhs...
I'm not trying to be snarky here, the point is that there is no easy solution and optimizing based on what politicians subjectively consider "humane" isn't going to get us anywhere. If we want to actually fix the problem then we need to focus on what's economically feasible rather than low-effort hot takes and sound bites. Free markets, with reasonable limits, can be part of that solution by revealing consumer preferences and allowing for efficient allocation of limited resources.
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