11 ms·
You may not like it, but this is what peak private-markets-for-public-goods looks like.
by uoaei 7y ago
You may not like it, but this is what peak private-markets-for-public-goods looks like.
- rayhendricks 7y agoI’m just waiting for experion to get hacked again and all this info to be public.
- 52-6F-62 7y agoThat was my first thought—then I recalled, "no that was Equifax, wasn't it?" Sadly, no. It's been all of them, including Experian. This seems flat-out mad to me. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/oct/01/experian-hack-t-mobile-credit-checks-personal-information https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/oct/01/experian-ha...
- slumdev 7y agoWell, the Equifax hack was way bigger. Probably took a little pressure off of the other bureaus when that happened. Periodic reminder that there are more bureaus than just Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion, and all of them buy and sell your data every day. One of them [3] even sells your salary data to prospective employers so that they can negotiate against you more effectively. 1. https://www.thebalance.com/6-small-credit-reporting-agencies-consumers-should-know-about-4210980 https://www.thebalance.com/6-small-credit-reporting-agencies... 2. https://www.doctorofcredit.com/two-credit-bureaus-you-should-freeze-before-you-apply-for-a-u-s-bank-credit-card/ https://www.doctorofcredit.com/two-credit-bureaus-you-should... 3. https://www.theworknumber.com/ https://www.theworknumber.com/
- 52-6F-62 7y agoHoly shit at number three. As if we didn't have enough reasons to despise Equifax already.
- marriedWpt 7y agoCan we call it a cartel market instead of private markets? The various healthcare leaders use their wealth to strengthen their position through laws. Most sectors cannot operate like US medical, they are their own beast.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago> The various healthcare leaders use their wealth to strengthen their position through laws. Everyone who can does that. Laws and politics aren't a separate magisterium from business; there are no hard borders here.
- SkyBelow 7y agoThere is one difference: violence. Laws are enforced on threat of violence. A business cannot force you to follow their procedures, at most they can deny you business. If I start selling drugs I import at a cheaper price, the government will use violence to stop me (including potential enslavement for a few years). That one difference is all that matters.
- claudeganon 7y agoThen healthcare shouldn’t be a business because the natural result of refusing to provide it to those in need is injury and possibly death. That seems a greater and more imminent threat that people in the US face than most forms of state violence.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoThat's a difference, yes, but orthogonal to the topic. As a businessman, as much as you can direct the behavior of both your customers and your employees, you can influence the lawmakers. After all, they too want money or things that money can buy. Violence is just one side of the coin that is power. The other side is voluntary (or technically voluntary but not quite) participation, which is primarily controlled by money. That's what makes politics and markets intertwined.
- cwzwarich 7y ago
- thisisnico 7y agoSo absolutely happy to be Canadian.
- Santosh83 7y agoEventually coming to all countries as the elite in power are falling for the prospect of huge money...
- FireBeyond 7y agoSo every other country in the first world offering some form of socialized medicine will inevitably be like this, the US is just "winning" and leading the charge? Or are we more the token outlier with a "worst of all worlds" system?
- ddxxdd 7y agoGovernment-run health care systems tend to lead to higher healthcare costs, since the beneficiaries aren't the payers. Around the world, it appears that low costs lead to universal healthcare, not the other way around. What America needs to do is make it cheaper and easier to become a medical practitioner without taking on half a million dollars in debt and wasting half of one's pre-retirement life. No fancy government program will work without first addressing that issue.
- larkost 7y agoWhat is your evidence for this? The US is almost alone amongst developed countries in not having a government-run general heal care system, and has the highest costs (while not covering everyone). And Medicaid, Medicare, and the Veterans Administration (the three big government run healthcare systems here) all run more efficiently by every measure than any private health insurance system. Note that I fully recognize the problems that the VA has had, but when you really look at it fairly, they have many parallels to problems in the commercial side of the system, we just don't tolerate that when it comes to government (nor should we).
- tryptophan 7y ago'public good' doesn't mean 'thing I want the government to give me'. Your sentance is complete edgy nonsense. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- seneca 7y agoFor those who don't know the definition: "In economics, a public good is a good that is both non-excludable and non-rivalrous" "A good is considered non-rivalrous ... if, for any level of production, the cost of providing it to a marginal (additional) individual is zero" "... a good or service is non-excludable if non-paying consumers cannot be prevented from accessing it."
- criddell 7y agoYou know what he's saying though.
- uoaei 7y agoI suppose "public service" is technically the more appropriate term. But it is a public benefit in the sense that healthy people can contribute more to a healthy economy.
- raxxorrax 7y agoBut otherwise I could be made responsible to pay for that other poor soul, the concept of risk distribution is too complicated and strokes of fate never touch me.
- Mirioron 7y agoThe issue in the US seems to be that even if you have a decent insurance plan you can still easily end up getting treatment by someone out of network. An anaesthesiologist or similar.
- lotsofpulp 7y agoI wonder how it works if you're wearing a shirt that says "Don't touch me unless you are in network with xyz insurance plan #".
- froindt 7y agoThat won't save you. The doctor left the room and did a quick phone consult with a radiologist about your x-ray. Radiologist is out of network, so you'll get a big, fat, separate bill from them.
- SkyBelow 7y agoHow so? Last I checked there are massive laws about who can open a hospital, who can operate as a doctor, who can sell what kinds of insurance, who can sell drugs, and what can be sold as a drug. This is government granted oligopoly. Edit: Technically oligopoly, not monopoly, though it may tend towards one.
- uoaei 7y agoThe logical conclusion to private markets + unrestricted lobbying + Citizens United. They literally made the laws that restrict competition. They were only capable of this because of the insane amounts of profit they extracted from an otherwise public service, which they spend on schmoozing lawmakers.
- SkyBelow 7y agoIt also requires removal of limits on what laws the government can pass. If governments were limited to what laws they can pass when it involves consenting individuals, this would also not occur.
- uoaei 7y agoInteresting. Are you suggesting that in cases where all parties must consent, the law may not be passed until those parties explicitly provide consent?
- SkyBelow 7y agoI meant more that the government has no place legislating the behavior. I take the idea that what two consenting adults do in their own bedroom is their own business and not the government's and apply it even if they are, for example, trading or doing drugs in their bedroom. Granted, all of this is pretty much meaningless when you have a government overstepping its bounds and doing what it wants. In that case, it seems the blame of the corrupted system would fall on those corrupting it (the corrupt government allowing itself to be bribed in exchange for monopolies).
- fennecfoxen 7y agoNonsense. A public good is something that doesn't run out when more people use it, such as knowledge. Medical care makes use of limited resources such as drugs, hospitals, doctors and nurses.
- vippy 7y agoFrankly, I'm disgusted by this. Expand VHA; provide universal care; healthcare is a human right!
- waffle_ss 7y agoWhat I don't like is low-effort memespeak on HN (even if I agree with the sentiment). This is one of the last places that has kept that at bay - until recently.
- adambyrtek 7y agoFrom the HN guidelines: "Please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills." Yes, I can see that your account was created in 2011 :)
- waffle_ss 7y agoI'm aware of that guideline which is why I didn't say that exactly. Regardless, I don't think silent downvotes really cut it anymore either - nowadays I tend to run out of them after reading only a couple submissions with active comment threads.
- zionic 7y agoSeems like proper application of the downvote button is called for.
- waffle_ss 7y agoI did apply it, and this is my explanation of why, which is proper etiquette.
- uoaei 7y agoI think one-offs like this are ok, and I'd like to think mine was a step above "low-effort" ;) Besides, check out the discussion it spawned! It's those long chains that end up being an out-of-order recital of some famous TV/movie scene that really irk me, personally. Those and similar are cases where the value is only in recognizing the source and getting that dopamine hit, and not in any further contribution to the discussion.
- merpnderp 7y agoPeak? This is the most heavily regulated market in the US, and fully 40% of all medical spending is from federal, state, and local governments. This is peak political corruption.
- SuperFerret 7y agoCapitalists wrote the laws.
- unishark 7y agoI have seen estimates that as much as two thirds of healthcare spending actually traces back to the govt when you count subsidies too. It is a mostly-socialized system at this point. And of course even where the govt is not funding the product, they are stipulating in detail what it must include. E.g. insurance must include a long list of things from mental health care to nicotine patches, forcing people to go through their insurance rather than through a market where they would negotiate prices.
- privateSFacct 7y agoHuh? Medicine is highly regulated. If this was a market you would have hospitals posting prices and negotiating with customers directly on price / quality. Instead health plans market to EMPLOYERS (not the consumers of the actual product). Trust me - the service there is pretty amazing! Tax law is designed to in many cases benefit these employer negotiated plans.
- uoaei 7y agoThe market conditions as they stand today were constructed by the participants in that market. This is an outcome that one can reasonably expect, since lawmakers can be bought and a large proportion of health services are pretty much completely inelastic.
- dave_b 7y agoBuying people off isn’t a result of capitalism, it’s always going to be a problem because of fundamental human incentives. Any system will fail if it’s administrators are corrupt and simply abandon the system. You’re basically blaming capitalism for the government failing to uphold capitalism, it’s absurd.
- Gibbon1 7y ago> Buying people off isn’t a result of capitalism Buying people off is the essence of capitalism.
- dang 7y agoThis comment broke the HN guidelines by taking the thread on a generic ideological tangent. Those are predictable and boring, and lead to flamewars. Please don't post them here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html