3 ms·

Single payer healthcare systems lack two critical aspects of the basic income: freedom of choice, and customer feedback. Freedom of choice allows consumers to

• anigbrowl 12y ago
  Freedom of choice allows consumers to select the services and packages which would most benefit them, and single payer healthcare does not allow this. The vast majority of consumers are incapable of making those determinations. The few exceptional people that take the lead in their own diagnosis and treatment and become more informed than the medical professionals they interact with are dwarfed by the vastly greater number of people that just want to be told which pills to take at what intervals. There's a massive Dunning-Krueger effect when it comes to self-administration of healthcare. I've met a lot of people who proclaim themselves wiser than doctors but who, when pressed, are unable to properly articulate even the symptomology of their condition. Customer feedback (through selection of providers of goods and services) is critical, as it allows bad firms to fail, and good ones to continue. The basic income does not interfere with this type of signal, but the single payer system completely destroys it. Incompetent or unethical mdeical professionals often cling to their positions for years in the private sector, just like they sometimes do in the public sector. Likewise, the public sector is capable of firing or barring such from practice. If you ever live in a country with socialized healthcare for any length of time, then you'll also notice that hospitals and clinics get shut down for lack of efficiency, eg tiny rural hospitals left behind by demographic shifts. Fully free markets depend on participants being fully informed about market product and services, and upon the ability to defer, invest, or divest whenever it is most economically advantageous to do so. Neither of these conditions obtain where healthcare is concerned. The first I have mentioned above; as for the second, you can manage your risk to some degree, but your ability to predict your medical care requirements is pretty poor - strokes, heart attacks,a nd other less common medical conditions often strike without warning and while they can be insured against (in similar fashion to a derivative) most people are no better at being actuaries than they are being doctors. Don't even get me started on people's inability to choose their own genetic makeup. I think it's economically inefficient to expect people to develop the huge amount of expertise they need to be better predictors of their own healthcare needs than a doctor or insurer of median competence.
• guyzero 12y ago
  But on the positive side for single-payer healthcare, there's no upper bound on how much you get to consume, subject to medical necessity. The problem is that medical problems are financially bimodal: they tend to be pretty cheap (take some antibiotics) or incredibly expensive (you need dialysis or you have a brain tumour). So unless you have some sort of useful insurance plan that covers people and minor dependents for less than what you're getting in basic income you'll end up with the problem of people who are unable to get serious medical conditions treated. And making medical treatments universally accessible is part of the point of most single-payer healthcare systems.
  • nickff 12y ago
    You are right that single payer has a number of theoretical advantages, and I never meant to imply that single payer healthcare was prima facie 'bad'. I was only attempting to point out some major differences between single payer healthcare systems and the basic income.