Hey, the "I don't understand what a 100% free market is" guy is back after getting his *** handed to him.
Insurance and IVF
- Thread starter simply1
- Start date
I don't have to suppose, many other wealthy nations have made the transition and the data is available for anyone who cares to learn about it. This is a thread about IVF coverage and you're trying to inject your views on government spending to prove a point. If you want to debate single payer, come back to the cave and start a thread.
Okay, I will clarify, I technically didn't opt out, if you read my posts, the insurance company put a rider on me that I couldn't have any fertility treatments, including births (but I wasn't concerned about not giving birth); since my medical history says I wasn't supposed to be able to have kids. So some people in my pool had kids and I helped pay for them even though they said I couldn't have mine paid for. So I did make up for it. So if you have a kid and have BCBS, you are very welcome.
Cyclonepride
Thought Police
It seems hard for you considering you believe a 100% free market would actually lower costs when all it does is let monopolies run rampant. Then when asked for proof, it was provided and you disappeared like a fart in the wind.
But if we go to single-payer that's not a monopoly just because its the feds? The same feds that got scammed for $200B of fraud in the covid loan programs?
(I actually like single-payer in theory, but in practice I don't trust the USG to do it very well at all)
Health care is super complicated. Anything you change, causes problems and unintended consequences somewhere else.
e.g. requiring coverage for something raises demand for that something, which will in turn raise the price and delay the service because supply hasn't changed. Which in turn requires premiums to go up to cover not just the additional volume, but also the price increases. Not good. Reverse it- don't cover that service at all, demand falls because less people can afford it. That should cause prices to decrease. But there will be a lot of people that can't get the service at all. Also not good. Is there a balance to find? If so, how?
It's a big messy challenge, and there are no simple answers.
I'm just saying that IVF shouldn't be decoupled from regular coverage for births. It'd be like an insurance company saying "oh we have cancer coverage but we don't cover chemotherapy".
I never once argued for single-payer. I'm just saying a "100% free market" will do the exact opposite. Businesses have proven time and again that they value the almighty dollar over everything else.
Cyclonepride
Thought Police
All these examples eventually lost their dominance in the market to more nimble competition.
Those examples lost their dominance because they were deemed monopolies and forced to break up. If there was a 100% free market, that wouldn't have happened. This is high school history.
And I just think people should be able to opt out if they choose to not have kids, but somehow that makes me a POS I guess.
Doctors get paid a lot less in other countries. And they don't pay the higher drug costs because they get something of a free ride on the development costs - the Rx companies know the big money is in the US so that's where they price highest. Super nice of the US to grab the check on that.
I'd also add that our overall life style choices (sedentary, stress, car crashes, bad diet) contribute not insignificantly to those worse outcomes.
All that said... I do agree that what we have is sub-optimal for sure. And that the admin companies are the ones making bank. Ever seen EPIC's campus?
Nice straw man. I never claimed you were a POS. Just said you were displaying the mentality of "eff you, I got mine". Anything you read into that is probably your subconscious telling you something.
This is a really interesting take, explain for the rest of the class how it was "nimble competition" and not government regulations that ended the Standard Oil and AT&T monopolies.
Ah yes, we had the same medical and technological capabilities 100 years ago as we do today.
We can solve the IVF problem with bloodletting and limb amputations. Recommend tobacco products and cocaine as medicines during the procedures.
Surely anyday now 'nimble competition' will arrive to bring down grocery prices driven by 4 companies owning 90% of the brands in a given grocery store.
People seem to forget that a monopolist company already has the resources to price out any other upcoming competition. It's too late. They have the economic scale necessary to eat full losses on product sales just long enough to sink any other disrupter.
