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Yes. I'd say: No UBI without good affordable health care for all. No UBI without good affordable education for all. No UBI without humane unemployment benefi
by craigsmansion 7y ago
Yes. I'd say:
No UBI without good affordable health care for all.
No UBI without good affordable education for all.
No UBI without humane unemployment benefits for all.
No UBI for all, because you already managed it.
- zhoujianfu 7y agoWouldn’t a (high enough) UBI mean the free market would create “affordable” education and “affordable” health care and obviate the need for unemployment benefits?
- zozbot234 7y agoThere is no free market in education credentials or in healthcare. Both sectors are heavily regulated by the government.
- chongli 7y agoRegulation isn’t the reason those sectors aren’t free markets. On the contrary, regulation exists because they can’t be free markets. Both lead to market failures due to information disparities, principal-agent problems, massive externalities, and a lack of free choice (in the case of health care).
- zozbot234 7y agoThe issue is the amount of regulation, of course. Regulatory capture can have worse effects than most market failures, and healthcare is one of the most obviously "captured" sectors.
- dantheman 7y agoMost health care is not emergency care so there is a lot of choice. Same with education. They could easily be freed from massive amounts of regulation.
- Ididntdothis 7y agoI would prefer more regulation to make sure prices are transparent. The current system is set up to make prices as opaque as possible. The employer has a lot of information, the provider has information, the insurance has information, but the patient is being kept in the dark. That is, until the big bill comes in the mail.
- dantheman 7y agoCompletely agree. Prices are required. What hospitals are doing now basically amounts to fraud. In no other 'market', since it's not a market, do customers have no idea if what the price of goods and services are.
- twblalock 7y agoNo country that has achieved high-quality affordable education and health care for its citizens has done it via market-based means. It probably can't be done.
- refurb 7y agoHealthcare in Switzerland and Singapore is largely private.
- Ididntdothis 7y agoI don’t know about Singapore but in Switzerland there is a lot of regulation around insurers and doctors to set prices. Same in Germany.
- twblalock 7y agoIt's not a free market though. It is heavily regulated.
- refurb 7y agoIt’s not in the US either. Health care is intensely regulated.
- Ididntdothis 7y agoNot the pricing and billing practices. At least not in a way that’s beneficial to the patient.
- refurb 7y agoOh it most certainly is regulated, but I would agree not to much benefit for patient. Although the reason you pay $0 co-pay for preventative visits is because the govt says insurance companies have to.
- Kaiyou 7y agoMoney is a representation of wealth, if you print more of it, the money loses it's value to match the wealth. We call this inflation. You cannot give away wealth that you do not have. If we truly had a free market, we'd have none of these issues, since wealth aggregation wouldn't be prevented through regulations. For example, you can already get free education of mostly everything from the Internet, but without getting a piece of paper at the end with the stamp of some university. It's a form of regulation, since without that piece of paper you'll have a hard time selling your services. Similarly, you can get all the information you need to lead a healthy life style, making it less likely for you to even need health care. But still lots of people just eat till obesity ruining their own bodies. In Japan there's a system where your company does yearly health checks and if you gain weight, you have to pay more in taxes or some such scheme. Curiously nearly nobody in Japan is obese.
- SlowRobotAhead 6y ago... so you know... obesity isn’t usually from eating to excess because you can. It’s from eating high calorie low nutrition foods. Poor people in the US aren’t obese because they have excess it’s because it is cheapest to buy high calorie foods. Obviously I’m not talking 400lbs, that still takes effort and money, but 250lbs is easy to hit when poor.
- Kaiyou 6y agoIt's easy to hit because the incentives work out that way. If the incentives were adjusted through higher tax for higher weight, I wonder if this trend could be reverted.
- luckylion 6y agoWith that read, most European countries have UBI and then some. I assure you, the proponents of UBI in Europe will violently disagree.