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 Originally Posted by wufwugy
I'm still unconvinced about how something like healthcare can be fixed purely by the markets. I mean, we had that already and it didn't work. We got Medicare and Medicaid because the private insurers weren't insuring the old and the sick because they were too expensive. Currently, the most efficient healthcare insurance programs we know of utilize government mandating of some form, even Singapore, the bastion of free market policies
I think there could be a market-separate or at least market-insulated solution to this, similar to your guaranteed income article.
Like lets just imagine what healthcare would be like in America if there were no government at all. The way I see it, the prices of all forms of healthcare would drop precipitously over time. Especially the prices of medicine. Americans would have extremely cheap access to the most commonly used life supporting meds like antibiotics with no need of a prescription. All of the currently existing mechanisms (like the AMA for instance) for artificially inflating the costs of healthcare would be gone. There would be more doctors, consistent with the demand for doctors. There would be "brackets" of healthcare provision and quality, and the poor could choose lower brackets.
To me that already sounds better than the way things currently are in America, and as I said, you could solve the problem of people not being able to afford it by less market-invasive means.
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