40,000,000 voted against Shillary not for Trumpie the so-called "lesser" of two evils. Yup you are correct if you believe I didn't vote for either. I did write-in vote for another "losing" but actual Republican. At one time private company health insurance was a lot more affordable than currently ("life was simpler then") so companies provided it as just another perk but like any other business expense it had to be rationalized. When the free market is allowed to function properly companies compete for workers over time with expanding and contracting salary AND benefits packages. Neither is ever given. Of course all things being equal group rates are lower but even so if a company has expenses in running such a group that expense again has to be rationalized (and might tax efficient to boot wink, wink) otherwise they wouldn't do it. Even if they are a mid-western grandfatherly type. Bottom line above all else after all.
As a Libertarian, I used to think as Friedman did. Friedman is talking here of the "free enterprise"* solution to unaffordable medical care costs. He is speaking of the evils of what economists now call "regulatory capture." I think he is correct in regard to regulatory capture. If, in the U.S., we simply moved to Single Payer without addressing the problem of regulatory capture we wouldn't accomplish much. His assumption, however, that high cost (~1965) is due to advances in medicine and people demanding more sophisticated medical treatment is on very shaky ground, though it is a popular assumption made by those trying to find excuses for our absurd medical costs.. It ignores today's reality that medical care is just as sophisticated in the other developed nations as it is in the U.S.; yet costs in these other countries are far lower. It is more likely, IMO, that high costs in the U.S. are to a significant extent due to regulatory capture favorable to providers in combination with the buyer, i.e., the patient, not being able to walk away from a deal they don't like. The latter is characteristic of medicine everywhere, but the regulatory climate is far different elsewhere. It is far less favorable to providers. I think Friedman is both right and wrong. He is right about regulatory capture holding up prices, but wrong about the cost effects of advances in medicine. This latter factor should actually reduce costs; not increase them as he seems to have suggested. But in the presence of regulatory capture these advances can not work their magic, which would otherwise reduce costs.*** In most countries there are prescribing pharmacists (this is a major cost saving feature that regulatory capture in the U.S. prevents, and something Friedman did not mention) and , importantly, regulatory capture, in general, is largely absent from the national health plans of other countries. Absence of regulatory capture, however, should not be confused with absence of regulation, these are two quite different kinds of regulation. Participation in national plans elsewhere is mandatory so there is true cost sharing. The healthy share the costs of the Sick. There are tight cost controls, and if insurance companies are involved, e.g., Switzerland, they are highly regulated in favor of the patient and uniformity, despite different companies being involved. The national health plan is the same throughout the entire country. (There is no opting out of parts of the plan by specific provinces to screw up the works, as in the U.S.) And too, while people in other countries sometimes find it advantageous to purchase supplemental insurance that augments their national plan no country other than the U.S. has duel health plans, one private the other public, which must be paid for simultaneously, but can't be used simultaneously. I'm speaking here of our way of paying for medicare our entire working lives and beyond into old age while simultaneously paying for private health insurance during our working years. No one yet has convinced me that this isn't an absurd idea. We offer up to the private, for profit insurers the low risk younger population; then we dump the elderly in their sick and waning years onto medicare that they have also paid for, while letting the private companies off the hook. Of course we wouldn't want to cut the private insurers out entirely of the profitable elderly market, so we generously let them sell supplemental policies to the elderly. In all the sane countries of the world people pay just one health premium for their Uniform National Health Plan,. We are the only country that gets to pay two premiums. This is a plan that only a "stable, genius" might come up with. I think I know where we could find one. The weakness in Friedman's 1965 argument, I believe, is his failure to recognize that a critical element for a satisfactory free market solution is missing in many instances of U.S. provider-patient interaction. In those instances the customer cannot shop and walk . Because of this missing component, providers, if allowed, can charge far more than would be the case in a true free market* transaction. Hence the need for regulation!; but not the kind of regulatory capture that exists in the U.S. I think our brand of U.S. capitalism, which is warping more and more toward "corporatism" or fascism with regulatory capture as a prominent feature, makes us incapable of solving our health care problems without a genuine crisis occurring first.** ___________________ * There is a dichotomy of meaning to the phrase "free enterprise". Friedman is using the expression in the noble sense where everyone is free to enter the market on equal terms and the buyer and seller can both walk away from a deal they don't like. The other more pernicious meaning of the same phrase, "free enterprise," is synonymous with laissez faire and refers to the absence of government oversight of business so that businesses are free to do whatever they like, including form Cartels and Monopolies and lobby for regulations that facilitate capture of a market and the shutting out of would be competition. This latter definition is the business man's definition. It has also become, judging by actions rather than words, the definition adopted by certain government operatives, including many in Congress today. **There was a time in the U.S. prior to the introduction of Medicare, when medical costs were far more affordable (prior to the 1930s there was no concerted effort to limit the number of new physicians). There was no laws preventing a physician or hospital from turning away a patient. Most physicians, however, considered it their duty to treat the indigent as well as those who could pay. Physicians were almost all in private practice and they varied their charges according to the patients ability to pay. During the depression the attending physician at a birth might receive a freshly plucked chicken in payment! Hospitals for patients who could pay might turn away those who could not. In Cities there were separate facilities for charity patients. There was at that time a vast difference between the standard of care for the indigent and that for those of means. That would not be acceptable today. If one were to pass down the hall of the Cook Country Charity Hospital in the Chicago of the 1930's the scene with gurneys lining the walls would have been vastly different than what you would find in a Chicago Hospital in 2018. ***A cost factor that I omitted and Friedman did not mention (it was far, far less important in 1965) is the horrible inefficiency of the U.S. system, with duplication of tests, poor communication among providers to the same patient, mountains of paperwork and layers of personnel between the patient and an actual physician. If one was in a contest to design the most inefficient system possible, this U.S. Health delivery system is the one you would design.
These two sentences are completely opposite. You are not a libertarian... Everything you wrote is pure communist nonsense...
Since you have diagnosed me as "slow" in your previous posts, please allow me to reciprocate... I find your views quite extreme and touchingly naive (given your comment about parenting, I have to guess that you're quite young). Furthermore, your attachment to labels and names (everyone who disagrees with you is a "communist" Hitler/Stalin/Mao) suggests same. In fact, in this thread you have invoked Hitler's name twice without provocation, proving yet again that Godwin's Law is alive and well. Your basic argument is an example of a "continuum fallacy" and you have not bothered to educate yourself even slightly on the topic which many great political philosophers have written on. I wish you the best of luck!
I couldn't care less what you think of my opinions... You think mine are naive. I think yours are plain stupid, especially considering reality. So what? One example of a parent who has opinions like these is the already mentioned David Friedman. The definition of communism is basically power centralization/big government. It's simple logic that anyone who defends any nationwide program (such as single payer) is conceptually a communist(even if he or she is stupid enough not to see it). Hayek explains this concept in "The Road to Serfdom" clearly, that allowing little government where it shouldn't, inexorably leads to huge governments and all it's problems(a look at today's world shows exactly that). So, to me, you're the one who is in great need of educating yourself by looking at the shit the world is in by allowing government growth everywhere. And since when must I "wait for provocation" to mention anything or anyone's name for that matter? Stop avoiding the reality and running from the fact that your ideas of allowing government to have increasing power over individuals is any different from the persons whose name I quoted. Each and everyone of them at some point had great support from people that thought that theirs was a "great idea", that's why these names are so well known today. But for some reason, those who refuse to look at history and see the actual consequences of supporting that shit, keep defending the exact same process that lead to catastrophes over and over. To me, these are the real "extreme" views, and they are extreme in many ways, but looking at history, they are particularly extreme in one feature: stupidity. "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
Indeed, none of it matters... Like the old adage goes, opinions are like assholes, everybody's got one. We will just have to live with the fact that our opinions differ. I am pretty sure that I should be able to handle that.
Exactly... The difference is, that I have no problem with your opinions(as idiotic as they may be) and in what I describe, there is no problem in you having your opinion and living by your ideas. But the only way to make your ideas possible is by forcing others to do things they don't want to do(feed parasites is one of the best examples of this). This is the main aspect here. And if a point reaches that the ones being explored can't take it anymore, the parasites that live by your rules will have to put their lives on the line to keep living at the expense of others(as it has happened before in the American Revolution).
Who gives a shit? Milton Friedman died at 96 saying these exact same things, David Friedman, his son, who is 72 and a parent, continues to defend even less government than his father to this day.(as I already mentioned) (Useless)Attempts to disqualify arguments by addressing "age" or "being a parent or not" are typical of those who aren't able to sustain their arguments through logic and because of that try to change the dicussion from the subject to the opponent.