Hospitals that make profits should pay taxes

But that wasn't enough to juice profits so pricing had to be made as opaque as possible to screw over anyone who isn't a giant insurance company ensuring the little guy without insurance who "pays his bills" pays more than 10x anyone else in the system.

I don't know of any other industry with this level of depravity and greed.

Where's the other side of the ledger: the services and products that the company provided to the community.

Hospitals are a great example. Put money in, get some health out.

How do we value getting our bladder fixed?

It is easy to look at the money and forget what we get in return.

What value do we get from an iPhone? If no more smartphones were produced I wonder where the market price would shift to? We could even find out if China has a war.

This is funny because statistically wealthy people are the ones usually against increases in taxes.

I was born in Iran, so I’ve dealt with my fair share of bullshit. My conclusion from my life is that we are individuals and we are a collective as well. A collective where if there’s a lot of illness in a part of it, it makes us all sick.

Second off we literally do not need more taxes to have proper healthcare in this country. We do not have a money problem, but a politics and policy problem. We have a problem that a lot of people think that by helping others, they’re the ones getting punished.

A healthy society means a society that has more energy and time to work on problems that benefit us all.

May I suggest this, instead of seeing healthcare coverage for more people as a punishment for you, see it as a collective investment to allow people to focus on things that matter.

And, note that healthcare isn’t the point of service by a doctor. It means healthy city design. Healthy subsidies for food (instead of subsidies HFCS for example). It means better public transit. It means actual neighbors and neighborhoods. It means longer weekends.

Isn't this consistent with their mission? If a student comes from millionaires, they can pay the full rate. Others get a discount according to need.

> They put that money into real estate investment, but they don't actually do anything with the land

This is caused by the opposite of what you're objecting to: What they should be doing is renting out the property and using the revenue to further their mission. But as soon as they do that the state would start collecting both property tax and income tax on the rent, even if 100% of the rental income is going to the non-profit's mission. Between that and the costs of maintaining a rental property, you've made productive use into a net loss and created the perverse incentive to do nothing with the property instead.

In theory the "problem" with this is that a non-profit could operate a profit-making business as a funding source, but why is that a problem? If an independent for-profit business can deduct a donation to a charity, why shouldn't a charity be able to deduct a "donation" to itself?

To behavior. If you buy a sports car, you pay higher car insurance. If you buy a motorcycle, you should pay higher health insurance. If you live riskily or unhealthily, your coverage should cost more and not be averaged out over the less risky.

Risk calculus should be considered with everything. It's essential to extending a home loan, but not when granting a college loan. Decoupling risk leads to bad outcomes.

> but not the much more common sports that cause significant injuries.

I think sports players should pay more for injury insurance. And roofers, loggers, etc. Those costs will be absorbed by their respective industries where the costs are generated.

> this person does not deserve to live because I don't like their choices

I'm not saying that at all, and that's such a cartoon way of looking at this. You walk into a hospital in America and you get treatment. That doesn't mean you don't have to pay for it.

> I might have thought you could also see how the costs associated with many illnesses might contribute to the proportionally higher tax rates on things like alcohol and tobacco in countries with public health services.

I never said do not tax negative externalities. By all means, please do. We should tax drugs too.

> Your insurance premiums are priced to cover the YouTube stunters, the alcoholics, the people playing sports, the people driving, etc just like a Public Health Service.

I would like them to not. I would like to cover my risk profile.

Everyone should cover their own risk profile. That's fair and equitable.

> Because the metric for success in a public health service is treatment, the system is optimized to treat the most people.

It already does this. This is simply about who gets the bill.