I had a debate with my friend about healthcare.
We both want people to have easy access to good quality healthcare.
He claims that there is no profit incentive for doctors and hospitals in a socialized system, so they don’t seek to create a larger market. Private firms, on the other hand, make money by making people sick.
I retort:
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How do they make people sick?
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They profit from healing, not making people sick.
His response to the second point is by assertion. “They make money from making people sick!”
His response to the first reeks of conspiracy theory. The government is free to blame from conspiracy, but private entities are not. I explain that the FDA and AMA are corrupt, and the government has a heavy hand in healthcare in the US. He agrees that they are corrupt and need to be cleaned up.
So why is it that government agencies that have shown to be defunct and corrupt need to be cleared of corruption and relied on, while we can’t rely on private firms who haven’t been shown to hurt people on a frequent basis outside of abuse of gov’t granted privileges?
Simpy put, the government has been shown to cause much more harm than private firms without government privilege. So why should the government be given more of a chance, while the private firms are chastised?
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Of course, all of this is responded to by the unbacked assertion: “They make money from making people sick!”
Same line of reasoning gets us this:
The cobbler. He decides it is good business practice to sell expensive shoes that fall apart very quickly. People need more shoes. Like a bunch of idiots, everyone goes back to the same store and buys the same shoes instead of picking a different vendor. (People keep going to the same doctor who botches their surgery countless times) His brilliant business tactic gains him an eternal intergalactic monopoly on shoe sales.
Counterexamples to this problem of trying to hurt/hinder people to grow a market:
PC repair/health. More often than not, people fix comptuers for the better. It was not so great in the 90’s. Now it’s near perfect. No one takes computers anymore and cripples them for further repair. Microsoft doesn’t create viruses to infect windows machines. Just like the human body, it is a complex system and we trust it with other experts. They do good work. There is no government incentive here to not screw with people. There is incentive to do good work and profit.
Dentists.
Housing. Once again, people shop around and get good advice for what’s best. Sometimes you get problems. Most of the time, things are alright. If things go bad, they get bad publicity. I bet it would be better if people didn’t rely on government contracting and licensing so much, and that there were more of a free market here.
There are probably other examples.
On to housing…
I’ve had an argument with my brother about ratings agencies vs. government inspection of buildings. For some reason, the government inspection service gets no suspicion of being corrupt, while the private rating firm will “pass anyone who pays them enough money”. It doesn’t make much sense. The government inspector can get bribed, the building can collapse and people will die. The government will still be in business. The private business can be bribed, and when the building collapses and people die, the business will no longer be in business. This isn’t much different from Walter Block’s argument about private and public roads, where he talks about government management vs. private management, and proximate causes vs. ultimate causes.
I think humans have a long way to go. For the most part, it seems, people just grant the role of “unquestionable moral superior” to those institutions who have power over them.