Ah yes, the old libertarian cop-out. The most free market healthcare system in the world is too highly regulated and if we just take the regulations away it will perform better because ideology. This is despite the fact that if you look at healthcare systems in the world most performance metrics improve with more regulation but not less. But lets forget about being data-driven when ideological purity is at stake.
I don't have any real issue with regulations per se but with people claiming that a highly regulated market is 'free market'.
I'm actually quite happy with my socialized health care aside from the last time I went to the emergency room they sent me home to die and when I came back a day later they were rapidly pulling out faulty body parts before I did indeed die. Well, then there's the Phoenix VA death list scandal.
I know I shouldn't complain as it not like I risked life and limb in service of my country and earned it as a direct result of military service or anything.
My issue is less with what we call the individual markets in the experiment. It's more with looking at healthcare across a large data set of countries and finding a general trend that more regulations lead to better cost structures and better health outcomes for the population and then somehow jumping to the conclusion we need no regulation for everything to work. That's just inconsistent with empirical reality and it's one of these purely ideological fantasy-land claims.
I would very much like to see a study from a credible source who came to this conclusion based on a survey of different health care systems.
What I believe is more likely is people looking at the kind of regulations being used and concluding that the correlation between good and bad regulations can be directly tied to the profit motives behind said regulations. A purely state run health care system has zero incentive to impose regulations that seek to raise costs and hurt competitors because, by definition, there is no completion. A purely private health care system has a lot of incentive to regulate the amount of doctors (to keep wages high) or make reporting costs extremely high to push out the smaller hospitals and increase their market share &etc.
I suspect that reality falls somewhere in the middle no matter what system you look at and everyone wants to argue from the extremes (or accuse someone else as being an extremist as you so helpfully demonstrated) so there is no real dialog for trying to fix anything.
> healthcare systems in the world most performance metrics improve with more regulation but not less
This claim is almost always because american lifetime expectancies are bad. But thats because Americans are unhealthy, not because our healthcare is bad. Do you have a different reason to make this claim?
No. It is the outcome of a culture that values individualism to a toxic level and has accepted decisions that make your life shorter as normal. Really very little to do with healthcare at all. Americans dont value their lifespan like others do but apparently that means our healthcare is bad? Like there are plenty of things to complain about with our healthcare why choose something that isnt even true.
I have 100% government provided healthcare (aside from dental) and I won't go see a doctor unless I'm literally going to die or want them to pull cancer off my arm. My diet would probably horrify you. Healthy as a horse except for another bit of suspected skin cancer I need to get checked out.
