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This is mainly an issue with healthcare in the US, not “capitalism”. The fact that providers can perform services on you without telling you up-front what the

This is mainly an issue with healthcare in the US, not “capitalism”. The fact that providers can perform services on you without telling you up-front what the price will be is the problem. That isn’t how a lot of the rest of our capitalist society works - Amazon can’t raise the price of something I order from them after it’s shipped to me, my rent can’t change once I sign the lease contract which clearly states the charges up front, and so on...

pan69 7y ago
> The fact that providers can perform services on you without telling you up-front what the price will be is the problem. Of course. In an unregulated for-profit health care system that is definitely the problem and the way we got there was because of; if there are multiple vendors then prices will automatically go down. I'm not anti-capitalism. It just doesn't work for certain parts of society but it seems that in the US everything needs to be capitalised and the government clearly doesn't want to regulate this industry.
- javagram 7y ago
  This article itself is about someone who is on Medicare (government-run health insurance) getting a surprise bill because the hospital has mis-assigned his procedure to the wrong category to allow them to run up the bill. FTA: “In a feeble attempt to ameliorate the problem, Congress passed the Notice Act in 2015, which requires hospitals to inform patients of the implications of their observation status within 36 hours after observation services have been initiated. In other words, hospitals must advise patients of their observation status only after they have already incurred the expense of surgery and hospitalization.” This type of thing seems like the most immediate problem. It makes no sense that the price can be raised 36 hours after a procedure has already begun. How is anyone supposed to negotiate that properly? Just saying, I don’t think “capitalism” is necessarily the boogeyman here. The government itself is failing to negotiate properly with the providers when running its socialist healthcare system in this instance. (And non-government payers will run into the same problems, getting unfair bills that couldn’t be anticipated or negotiated before agreeing to the service)
AmericanChopper 7y ago
One of the primary reasons healthcare is so expensive in the US is that so many of the factors that influence price are not constrained by competition. Fixing those problems is largely a political matter, not an economic one. The economics of capitalist systems do not make any claims about the functionality of markets that are allowed to exist without competition. Which is why all serious free market economists exclusively promote competitive free markets. A free market economist who doesn’t believe government has a role in ensuring markets are competitive is really just an extreme libertarian. Any market where the buyer is not the person who’s paying, or where the buyer has to make a purchasing decision before they know the price (or even what goods/services they’re agreeing to buy), cannot possibly be influenced by the laws of supply and demand. It’s the same reason that you can look at essentially any government spending project, and amaze yourself by how little the government manages to achieve with so much money. The payer doesn’t have any choice about how much taxes they pay, and the decision maker has a very poorly constrained supply of other people’s money to spend.

pan69 7y ago

> The fact that providers can perform services on you without telling you up-front what the price will be is the problem. Of course. In an unregulated for-profit health care system that is definitely the problem and the way we got there was because of; if there are multiple vendors then prices will automatically go down. I'm not anti-capitalism. It just doesn't work for certain parts of society but it seems that in the US everything needs to be capitalised and the government clearly doesn't want to regulate this industry.

javagram 7y ago
This article itself is about someone who is on Medicare (government-run health insurance) getting a surprise bill because the hospital has mis-assigned his procedure to the wrong category to allow them to run up the bill. FTA: “In a feeble attempt to ameliorate the problem, Congress passed the Notice Act in 2015, which requires hospitals to inform patients of the implications of their observation status within 36 hours after observation services have been initiated. In other words, hospitals must advise patients of their observation status only after they have already incurred the expense of surgery and hospitalization.” This type of thing seems like the most immediate problem. It makes no sense that the price can be raised 36 hours after a procedure has already begun. How is anyone supposed to negotiate that properly? Just saying, I don’t think “capitalism” is necessarily the boogeyman here. The government itself is failing to negotiate properly with the providers when running its socialist healthcare system in this instance. (And non-government payers will run into the same problems, getting unfair bills that couldn’t be anticipated or negotiated before agreeing to the service)

AmericanChopper 7y ago

One of the primary reasons healthcare is so expensive in the US is that so many of the factors that influence price are not constrained by competition. Fixing those problems is largely a political matter, not an economic one. The economics of capitalist systems do not make any claims about the functionality of markets that are allowed to exist without competition. Which is why all serious free market economists exclusively promote competitive free markets. A free market economist who doesn’t believe government has a role in ensuring markets are competitive is really just an extreme libertarian. Any market where the buyer is not the person who’s paying, or where the buyer has to make a purchasing decision before they know the price (or even what goods/services they’re agreeing to buy), cannot possibly be influenced by the laws of supply and demand. It’s the same reason that you can look at essentially any government spending project, and amaze yourself by how little the government manages to achieve with so much money. The payer doesn’t have any choice about how much taxes they pay, and the decision maker has a very poorly constrained supply of other people’s money to spend.