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Education, Police, Fire, Healthcare do not have natural monopolies. Still a good list to have around so we can argue about where the line should be drawn. Kud

Education, Police, Fire, Healthcare do not have natural monopolies. Still a good list to have around so we can argue about where the line should be drawn. Kudos!

arjunnarayan 12y ago
Education doesn't, but police and fire definitely do: police because beat cops reduce crime for everyone, so they're a natural monopoly. Fire as well, since stopping houses burning down helps stop the entire neighborhood (especially when you have close-together row houses) burning down. Healthcare is arguably a public good, at least as far as vaccinations and contagious diseases go, since herd immunity is a large way to fight them (especially for contagious diseases for which we have 80%-90% effective vaccines). Not so sure about other illnesses (like cancer) though. I'm personally for socialized medicine for other reasons (humanitarian), but I agree that the natural monopoly argument is not applicable there.
- Tossrock 12y ago
  A natural monopoly doesn't mean it provides a public good, it means that a single entity can provide the service more efficiently than multiple competing entities.
  - arjunnarayan 12y ago
    Yeah you're right. I'm conflating the two and being confused. I apologize.
altcognito 12y ago
Healthcare is a highly imperfect market, and that's what makes it subject to either huge amounts of regulation, or outright external management. Consumers are very ill informed. Ccosts are not displayed, treatments options are not well defined, and knowing all of the options and understand them requires more time and education than is reasonable for most cases. Education is tricky, and honestly, I don't know any better than the next guy how to solve the issue. What's important to one parent may not be important to another. Second language? Art? Music? Sports? Recess? Lectures? History? Religion? Critical thinking? What outcomes are important? Good test scores? Writing?
- cookiecaper 12y ago
  None of these attributes are incumbent in the nature of delivering health care. They're just things that are part of the system today. As you stated, in today's health care system, true costs are obscured. The exact problem is that nefarious corporate forces have removed most of the real market elements by adding layers of indirection (health insurance), which allows everyone in the industry to maximize their dollars billed and push some paper around, and leaves a great many people totally screwed. The issue is that there's just enough variance and division that there isn't a unified, whole-hearted call for reform, because it works great for 30% of people, works mediocre for 40% of people, and completely leaves the last 30% destroyed. I believe that those ratios are calculated and intentionally kept in place to prevent unification and meaningfully addressing the issue on a social scale. Health care has become a perverse industry because its market properties were destroyed not by government, but by malicious corporate conglomerations out to maximize their own profit at the expense of human life. People forget that one of the purposes is government is to prevent private organizations from growing too powerful and interfering with the general welfare of the people, because the narrative is rarely framed this way, but it's a very important governmental function. I don't think socialization is the answer, but something has to be done. I think health care needs to be brought back down to earth, and we should outlaw all non-catastrophic health insurance products. The insurance racket has completely destroyed that market. There are other elements that have caused the health market to get completely out of whack, but insurance is at the very core of the issue, and it has to go away. When almost half of the country's bankruptcies are due to health care debt, simply sick people trying to stay alive, we have a real social problem that we need to address. Of course, we did the opposite of this and made it illegal not to have health insurance, only further inflating the size of the monstrosity that has leeched and destroyed the system in the first place. I don't believe writing a blank check, like the other countries have done, is the way out. I believe the way out is going back to a what-you-see-is-what-you-get approach, and forcing medical providers to charge rates people can actually afford, as their business will immediately plummet if they don't seriously rework their billing structure to become affordable again since people will actually be paying it now.
  - tomp 12y ago
mullingitover 12y ago
Police have a natural monopoly because they're agents of the government, and the government by definition has a monopoly on violence.
mynameisvlad 12y ago
I'd definitely argue that Police and Fire have natural monopolies. It's definitely more efficient for one agency to manage the entire police force for a city, rather than having multiple. Imagine having cops from 5 different services go out to one call, possibly mistaking the others for an armed civilian. You can see where that would lead, given how trigger happy some cops are already. Imagine 5 different fire trucks arriving at a scene. They wouldn't have enough space to do their job with all the others around them. Keeping track of the people at both of these scenes is also nearly impossible with several forces (and it's critical to know who's in the burning building or who's armed in a crime scene.)
- hga 12y ago
  However both police and firemen already deal with those issues, especially at the edges of cities. E.g. where I live, at the edge of two, police from both regularly handle incidents. Firemen are even more heterogeneous, in that they have arrangements for big fires and catastrophes like tornadoes where adjacent units come to help. After my city got hit by an EF-5 tornado, as I was exiting my trashed apartment complex, there were fire units varying from a small Indian tribe that's right across a state border from us (and the city e.g. treats the sewage of their casino) to one 40 miles away. Next day, the markings on my apartment door were from a fire unit the came from 160 miles away. What is needed is something like unity of command/hierarchy. Having two or more units responsible for the same territory leads to the sorts of problems you cite, e.g. a friend told me the NYC city police and subway police once got into a big firefight. This would have been in the '70s or earlier, now they've been unified.

Education, Police, Fire, Healthcare do not have natural monopolies. Still a good list to have around so we can argue about where the line should be drawn. Kudos!

arjunnarayan 12y ago

Education doesn't, but police and fire definitely do: police because beat cops reduce crime for everyone, so they're a natural monopoly. Fire as well, since stopping houses burning down helps stop the entire neighborhood (especially when you have close-together row houses) burning down. Healthcare is arguably a public good, at least as far as vaccinations and contagious diseases go, since herd immunity is a large way to fight them (especially for contagious diseases for which we have 80%-90% effective vaccines). Not so sure about other illnesses (like cancer) though. I'm personally for socialized medicine for other reasons (humanitarian), but I agree that the natural monopoly argument is not applicable there.

Tossrock 12y ago
A natural monopoly doesn't mean it provides a public good, it means that a single entity can provide the service more efficiently than multiple competing entities.
- arjunnarayan 12y ago
  Yeah you're right. I'm conflating the two and being confused. I apologize.

altcognito 12y ago

Healthcare is a highly imperfect market, and that's what makes it subject to either huge amounts of regulation, or outright external management. Consumers are very ill informed. Ccosts are not displayed, treatments options are not well defined, and knowing all of the options and understand them requires more time and education than is reasonable for most cases. Education is tricky, and honestly, I don't know any better than the next guy how to solve the issue. What's important to one parent may not be important to another. Second language? Art? Music? Sports? Recess? Lectures? History? Religion? Critical thinking? What outcomes are important? Good test scores? Writing?

cookiecaper 12y ago
None of these attributes are incumbent in the nature of delivering health care. They're just things that are part of the system today. As you stated, in today's health care system, true costs are obscured. The exact problem is that nefarious corporate forces have removed most of the real market elements by adding layers of indirection (health insurance), which allows everyone in the industry to maximize their dollars billed and push some paper around, and leaves a great many people totally screwed. The issue is that there's just enough variance and division that there isn't a unified, whole-hearted call for reform, because it works great for 30% of people, works mediocre for 40% of people, and completely leaves the last 30% destroyed. I believe that those ratios are calculated and intentionally kept in place to prevent unification and meaningfully addressing the issue on a social scale. Health care has become a perverse industry because its market properties were destroyed not by government, but by malicious corporate conglomerations out to maximize their own profit at the expense of human life. People forget that one of the purposes is government is to prevent private organizations from growing too powerful and interfering with the general welfare of the people, because the narrative is rarely framed this way, but it's a very important governmental function. I don't think socialization is the answer, but something has to be done. I think health care needs to be brought back down to earth, and we should outlaw all non-catastrophic health insurance products. The insurance racket has completely destroyed that market. There are other elements that have caused the health market to get completely out of whack, but insurance is at the very core of the issue, and it has to go away. When almost half of the country's bankruptcies are due to health care debt, simply sick people trying to stay alive, we have a real social problem that we need to address. Of course, we did the opposite of this and made it illegal not to have health insurance, only further inflating the size of the monstrosity that has leeched and destroyed the system in the first place. I don't believe writing a blank check, like the other countries have done, is the way out. I believe the way out is going back to a what-you-see-is-what-you-get approach, and forcing medical providers to charge rates people can actually afford, as their business will immediately plummet if they don't seriously rework their billing structure to become affordable again since people will actually be paying it now.
- tomp 12y ago

mullingitover 12y ago

Police have a natural monopoly because they're agents of the government, and the government by definition has a monopoly on violence.

mynameisvlad 12y ago

I'd definitely argue that Police and Fire have natural monopolies. It's definitely more efficient for one agency to manage the entire police force for a city, rather than having multiple. Imagine having cops from 5 different services go out to one call, possibly mistaking the others for an armed civilian. You can see where that would lead, given how trigger happy some cops are already. Imagine 5 different fire trucks arriving at a scene. They wouldn't have enough space to do their job with all the others around them. Keeping track of the people at both of these scenes is also nearly impossible with several forces (and it's critical to know who's in the burning building or who's armed in a crime scene.)

hga 12y ago
However both police and firemen already deal with those issues, especially at the edges of cities. E.g. where I live, at the edge of two, police from both regularly handle incidents. Firemen are even more heterogeneous, in that they have arrangements for big fires and catastrophes like tornadoes where adjacent units come to help. After my city got hit by an EF-5 tornado, as I was exiting my trashed apartment complex, there were fire units varying from a small Indian tribe that's right across a state border from us (and the city e.g. treats the sewage of their casino) to one 40 miles away. Next day, the markings on my apartment door were from a fire unit the came from 160 miles away. What is needed is something like unity of command/hierarchy. Having two or more units responsible for the same territory leads to the sorts of problems you cite, e.g. a friend told me the NYC city police and subway police once got into a big firefight. This would have been in the '70s or earlier, now they've been unified.