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The entire point of the article is that patients become customers, with an attendant reduction in care. When you treat people attempting to save their own lives
by Refreeze5224 11mo ago
The entire point of the article is that patients become customers, with an attendant reduction in care. When you treat people attempting to save their own lives as simply sources of profit, you subject them to all the other gross and manipulative sales/profit maximization strategies that capitalists use. It's not just that the costs are higher, it's about a loss of human dignity.
Fundamentally it's a moral question, not an economic one. Should people's health and actual lives be treated as simply a way to generate profit? Answering anything other than no is a relatively new development in societies, and is flat out wrong.
- bko 11mo agoSo we shouldn't allow people to "profit" off saving our lives? Maybe we should ban for profit surgeons. Seems unfair, morally, that someone is profiting and living in a nice house and has a nice car from saving my life.
- Refreeze5224 11mo agoYou're putting words in my mouth, and I suspect you know it. As I said earlier, every other developed country in the world has already solved this, and the "hysterical emotional" capitalist obsession in the United States prevents us from following suit.
- lisbbb 11mo agoI'm fine with doctors making decent money, I'm not fine with MBA assholes making bank off of the bezzle. That's a huge difference--doctors add something to process, they are not vampires.
- getnormality 11mo agoI wonder if your problem is really with capitalism, or what capitalism even means. It seems some people view capitalism as basically free markets, and others view it as basically amoral profit maximization by any means necessary. I find this mix of meanings confusing. I tend to think both that markets are mostly good, and that we need independent education in and enforcement of moral virtue that restrains us from exploiting others for profit. Am I a "capitalist"? I suspect people will disagree. And exploitation happens in all political and economic systems, as the communists of the 20th and 21st centuries have showed us extensively, so it seems kind of misleading to associate exploitation so closely with capitalism.
- saulpw 11mo agoI agree, capitalism and "free markets" are two separate things. My less judgmental definition of capitalism, is the system where profits go to owners rather than workers. The doctor earns a salary while the hospital owner can extract any and all surplus. I think it's possible in theory that there's a form of capitalism that doesn't devolve into "amoral profit maximization", just like I think it's possible there's a form of communism that includes free markets and doesn't devolve into totalitarianism. For instance, if "capital" were passive owners that only received profits deemed surplus by capable and independent management, maybe we could still have nice things. But since capital has virtually all the power in capitalism, these owners are allowed to actively manage and exploit and enshittify to expand their own profits, at the expense of everything else.
- nradov 11mo agoMany US hospitals are owned by non-profit foundations or local governments. Some of the employees might be highly paid but no profits go to owners. These non-profit hospitals don't necessarily have lower prices or better care quality than for-profit competitors.
- nradov 11mo agoUnder capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism it is the reverse.