this post was submitted on 17 May 2024
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The market will solve it, Germany is an example. But there's no free market in US healthcare, that's the issue.
Hell no where did you get that from?
I mean the US healthcare market has huge amounts of regulatory and liceance capture that makes for free market healthcare impossible in the states. Its also, because of this subsidized a lot but practically forbidden to be efficient (because most of the industry is ran by for profit).
Kind of worst case of government stepping in only to prevent meaningful markets but not to support people in need (not to say Medicare and medicaid don't help some, they are the better example IMHO even if they pay out so bad most places practically refuse to take it).
This is big scale capitalism, not free market.
Capitalism is the key problem.
A free market is probably necessary. With a system where everyone has enough to live well, affordable healthcare, equal treatment etc.
A free market ensures a lot of quality standards.
But it is not only competition, improvements and "getting the best, the best way".
It is "making & selling something that people buy, the cheap way". This principle is fundamentally flawed, as environmental protection doesnt pay, and there is no real reason for companies to be good for the enviroment. Like, actually being good.
You can also argue that products enshittified over time (glued together laptops, unnecessarily weak drinking glasses, "IOT-ifying" everything, cheap clothes, throwaway razors, cheap food,...) because there is no value in making good products in a free market, if people get f**ing brainwashed and dont buy stuff based on their value over time.
And equally it is even worse with the environment. As there is no value in protecting the environment, nobody does it. Now laws force companies to list all important data, and this gets converted into some indirect form of money. But not nearly as transparently and freely as a free market. You may get fees or not, you may save some "carbon credits" but these are horrendously underpriced and can be bought with neocolonial freakshows like forcing people out of their own land, to "protect it", as if it would have been destroyed before.
And the main flaw is that there is no big reason to not fake these values. Or not just write down what you already do, and keep it at this. Or do more than needed.
And to the topic, a free market has no stop sign. Companies naturally grow bigger and bigger, get more and more efficient, critical for whole societies that rely on working for them, and thus they are inherently not "neutral possibilities in a free world".
This always leads to huge mega-giants having influence on people, politics etc.
And this leads us to the situation we are currently in. Companies abusing license and patent laws, to cripple the system that even made them possible.
I have no idea why the US is so f**cked up in this graph, but believe me Germany is also horrible.
Trickle down economics does work in a way that ensures basic healthcare for all germans. But meanwhile these damn germans produce a SH**LOAD of stuff.
I have no numbers but it is insane how much utter garbage we produce. And from this endless, insane stream of trash, we always scoop off enough profit to make the 1% even more ugly rich, and keep the said basic human rights intact.
This may work, but it is soooo far from sufficiency.
I really liked the latest video of "Second Thought", about the american dream and capitalisms natural path to fascism
From facts. German healthcare system is 100% privatised and it works very well due to minimal market regulations, but extensive safety regulation. The US healthcare system is bound to insane licensing processes and fees, yet close to zero safety regulations.
For example, the US only has a few medical air transport companies, because getting a license is very very expensive. Only big corps can afford it and they have a cartel like grip on the market as there's no competition. At the same time the US doesn't regulate their performance and pricing. So you end up with an artificial cartel monopoly which sets sky high prices for their services.
Similar licensing in Germany is much cheaper and any decent air company can afford it, so there's a lot of healthy competition. But they also have price caps, so services are actually affordable.
So, in short the difference is that Germany has a free market with pro-consumer regulations and the US has cartel monopoly without any pro-consumer regulations at all. And this approach goes through the whole healthcare system.
The free market always sorts itself out, especially with a small nudge from the state, that's why US corporations are lobbying hard to prevent all and any competition to themselves. And that's why corporate lobbying is called corruption elsewhere and is illegal.
This differentiation between weird license fees and safety regulations makes sense.
But the privatised hospitals etc is extremely problematic, as they underpay their stuff regularily, causing extreme situations.
I guess that a free market has advantages over slow and established monopoles. But the companies will still exploit as much as possible, if not every single thing is regulated.
Example environment and labor laws. If you have exact laws for every known process, they will try to find loopholes to be cheaper, because there is only profit, no moral.