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How do you explain other free markets that obviously deliver quality products at low prices? I don't feel gouged when I buy a television, a cell phone or lumber
by jes 13y ago
How do you explain other free markets that obviously deliver quality products at low prices? I don't feel gouged when I buy a television, a cell phone or lumber at Home Depot.
- gnoway 13y agoWell presumably you're not suffering from an ailment that requires immediate application of TV, Angry Birds or a 2x4 in those cases.
- twoodfin 13y agoEmergency care has to be just a piece of the cost pie. People shop around for health care all the time, including for very expensive things like childbirth.
- GabrielF00 13y agoThere was just a big NY Times article on the cost of childbirth. Turns out its extremely hard to shop around. Not only is it much more expensive in the US than in any other country to give birth, but, with a few exceptions, it's very difficult to get pricing information in advance. To quote: >When she became pregnant, Ms. Martin called her local hospital inquiring about the price of maternity care; the finance office at first said it did not know, and then gave her a range of $4,000 to $45,000. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/01/health/american-way-of-birth-costliest-in-the-world.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/01/health/american-way-of-bir...
- mpyne 13y agoPlus when you "shop around" you still need to select a doctor's office which is close enough to be within viable range once the moment of delivery is at hand. Even in the suburban areas I've lived in, for us that meant a "selection" of between 3-4 potential clinics, not exactly a very wide choice (and completely based on where I lived so it could very well have been that I would have been selecting from 4 of the worst clinics in the whole state).
- foobarian 13y agoOn the billing side, I feel like there is a lot of inefficiency due to errors caused by complicated systems. When my wife was pregnant, at some point we got billed several thousand dollars for a procedure the insurance company refused to cover. She called the insurance co., and they (I think) recoded the procedure to something that cost a couple of hundred dollars and was covered to boot. It seemed like there was a bunch of new employees on both sides who were learning as they went (and pressing random buttons). So forget in advance, pricing was hard to find out even post facto ;)
- rdtsc 13y agoSo how do you bring your child back after you ended up picking a cheaper bad doctor who kills your child. If you buy a bad TV you can return it and provide a bad review, so next time you shop from a better store. If you buy a car and it turns out to be a piece of shit, you just lost lots of money. It will take you years to recover and save for a better, but you still can. You can't get your life back, you can't get your health back sometimes, you can't return your dead child back. That's the problem.
- lostlogin 13y agoDo you link the expense with the quality? If bad doctors are out there its not up to the consumer to stop them, this is what regulatory bodies are for. basic public safety. Cost (in most places I have been - mostly within Australia, New Zealand and the UK) has little to do with the quality of the care.
- jes 13y agoOf the healthcare that is delivered, most is non-emergent.
- aestra 13y agoWhat if your primary refers you do doctor X for condition Y?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- DanBC 13y agoCell phones are a great example of the terrible results from supposedly free markets. Plans are deliberately priced to be confusing to compare prices; plans are frequently updated to cause people to be stuck in win-optimal contracts; consumers are gouged on some items (see bizarre cost of sms in UK); and companies collude to defeat market mechanisms - see the use of area codes in auction bids as a method of communication when frequencies were auctioned off.
- jes 13y agoDo you have a cell phone? If the results of this particular market are so terrible, why does virtually everyone elect, of their own free will, to buy a cell phone?
- DanBC 13y agoMany people buy cell phones. That doesn't mean the market works. Consumers are gouged every day by unfair practices from cell phone providers. I'm a bit confused how anyone using a cellphone could chino otherwise.
- MrMan 13y agoGenuinely want to kniw what sequence of letters was intended in stead of "cbino.
- victorhooi 13y agoI'd say probably "claim".
- ThomPete 13y agoBecause they have no other choice. We choose between what we have, not what is the best or the right thing to choose.
- jes 13y agoIf a person chooses it freely, how can you say it's not the right thing for them to choose? Epistemologically, how could you know this?
- nikatwork 13y agoFree markets are a problem when there is a resource that can be monopolized (doctors / medical supplies) or when corporate goals are at direct odds to community interest (a deregulated BP despoiling the Gulf of Mexico because safety measures are expensive and fuck you.) Home Depot would happily gouge you if they could form a cartel and gain enough control of the supply chain.
- mpyne 13y agoAnd not only would they happily gouge you, but they would then claim they have a duty to their shareholders to do so, as the law permits them to do it. This is, after all, the reason we tend to avoid government monopolies if we can avoid it. It's not just that government is inefficient, it's that monopolies are inefficient, whether "private sector" or otherwise.
- aamar 13y agoI'm in much agreement with your initial point (that free markets allow for price-fixing), but you're getting a lot of comments here because you overstate your case! There's nothing peculiar about medical supplies that make them easy monopolized. Pharmaceuticals and medical devices (neither of which are the topic of the original post) enjoy patent protection, but there are often many out-of-patent substitutes available. Doctors are limited, but that is primarily because the state makes it illegal to practice "medicine" without either being a doctor or being supervised by one. Much other scarcity stems from this one, e.g. limited insurance options because it's difficult to create a physician network. There are absolutely free-market-advocates out there who would remedy price-fixing problem by allowing self-taught people practice medicine. That should increase enough market-entrants to break any cartels we see. I'm not one of those advocates, because I see some sort of quality guarantees as helpful in this arena. But there are lots of aspects of the healthcare market that could benefit from more market-like behavior, whereas there are other aspects which could use less (i.e. more regulation). We need nuance in order to make progress.
- krichman 13y agoBut we want the state to regulate medical practitioners! Even if we support natural selection acting on humans, we don't want an ambulance to take us to a homeopathic healer or Christian scientist, we want them to take us to a licensed professional.
- abalone 13y ago> I don't feel gouged when I buy a television, a cell phone or lumber at Home Depot. You might if you were carted into a Home Depot unconscious on a gurney, handed a non-returnable light bulb and stuck with a bill for $6,844.
- rayiner 13y agoDo you feel ripped off when you buy a pair of Ralph Lauren jeans for $100+ made in Mexico for $7-8?
- tptacek 13y agoA bag of IV saline is a commodity. I would feel ripped off if I bought a bag of white flour and was charged $300 for it, too.
- dredmorbius 13y agoMass-produced clothing is also a commodity. You're just convinced it's not.
- tptacek 13y agoNo, it's not. Commodities are products with multiple sellers and minimal differentiation. You can only put Ralph Lauren clothes into that bucket by willfully ignoring the concept of differentiation. Meanwhile: there is literally no differentiation between different suppliers of IV saline; it's a standardized product.
- dredmorbius 13y agoWhen a brand label is reduced to "this is what we put on products our buyer/sourcer has obtained at the lowest cost", you no longer have a design element at work. Increasingly, brands don't designate manufacturer, but middleman (yes, there are exceptions, but they're increasingly, well, exceptional). Some very high-end custom-designer fashions might be excluded, but if you're buying off-the-rack (or mail-order/online) clothing manufactured in mass, you're buying a commodity, in the sense of a largely undifferentiated item. The label is the _only_ item of distinction (and not even that when you're getting grey-market goods). Incidentally, look up "commodity" in your dictionary, it doesn't mean what you think it does.
- dylangs1030 13y agoNo, that's wrong. Mass-produced clothing is the direct opposite of a commodity. A commodity would be silk, or cotton - the raw fabric used as base materials. What you then do with those materials to increase their value directly changes them from commodities into products. Put another way - gold is a commodity, as is silver. Jewelry, however, is not. It can't be a commodity if the material has been changed into a diversified form to increase its value - it has to be raw in order to be a commodity.
- andylei 13y agohammers are really good at pounding nails into walls. hammers are not good for turning screws. free markets are really good at efficiently allocating resources in certain types of markets, and not so good in other types of markets
- ZeroGravitas 13y agoYou probably were gouged when you bought that TV. A record fine for a CRT price-fixing cartel that ran from 1996-2006: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-20608949 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-20608949 And an LCD price fixing cartel that ran at the same time: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20910299 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20910299