So if the manufacturer charges a dollar for the bag of saline, and the hospital marks it up a couple orders a magnitude, hospitals must be absolutely swimming in cash, right? Did I miss that part in the article?
How to Charge $546 for Six Liters of Saltwater
111–120 of 191 posts
Re: How to Charge $546 for Six Liters of Saltwater
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are selectively re-arranging my words to create a different meaning. At no point did I say the US healthcare system was completely free.
"Today's Instagram outage is a perfect example of the dangers of hosting all your services on your own hardware." ... "I never said Instagram hosts their own services!"
What the hell? He really didn't say that. It really does look like you chopped up his comment to make a fake comment to argue against.
Re: How to Charge $546 for Six Liters of Saltwater
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those are insurers. The article is about the hospital supply market. In particular, the completely unregulated part of the hospital supply chain. So.. are you merely misinformed, or willfully ignorant?
> The article is about the hospital supply market. That's fine. The sentence I'm objecting to is about the US healthcare system.
Again: that is a sentence you made up. You ignored the "it is even more" clause, which makes it clear that he believes the current market dynamics presage what would happen in a deregulated market. What's worse, in order to "object" to the sentence, you deliberately misquoted the comment and attributed your broken misquote to him.
Re: How to Charge $546 for Six Liters of Saltwater
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Free 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.
I'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.
Re: How to Charge $546 for Six Liters of Saltwater
#115Many in this thread are claiming that price fixing wouldn't occur in a "truly free" market. This is misty-eyed naivety. In a completely deregulated free market, it is even more in the hospitals' interest to form a price-fixing cartel. Any new player in the market trying to set reasonable market prices could be excluded through market pressure tactics (eg, tell distributors don't sell to them or our cartel will no lon…
> the US healthcare system ... a completely free market I have read a lot of wrong things on HN, ranging from the merely misinformed to the willfully ignorant, but this might take the cake.
The sentence you're objecting to isn't claiming that US healthcare is a completely free market (which, as you note, would be an unbelievably ignorant view to hold... literally unbelievably). It's claiming that certain failures of the fairly-free US system already illustrate the sorts of failures that would plague a free(er) system.
You may or may not agree with that conclusion, but it's a far more plausible view for someone to hold than what you seem to have thought the original poster meant.
Re: How to Charge $546 for Six Liters of Saltwater
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Do you feel ripped off when you buy a pair of Ralph Lauren jeans for $100+ made in Mexico for $7-8?
A 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.
Re: How to Charge $546 for Six Liters of Saltwater
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the US healthcare system ... a completely free market I have read a lot of wrong things on HN, ranging from the merely misinformed to the willfully ignorant, but this might take the cake.
The sentence you're objecting to isn't claiming that US healthcare is a completely free market (which, as you note, would be an unbelievably ignorant view to hold... literally unbelievably). It's claiming that certain failures of the fairly-free US system already illustrate the sorts of failures that would plague a free(er) system. You may or may not agree with that conclusion, but it's a far more plausible view for…
"US healthcare system is in fact a perfect demonstration of the dangers of a completely free market"
The commenter actually says exactly that...that the US healthcare system is (in fact) a perfect demonstration of a completely free market.
Re: How to Charge $546 for Six Liters of Saltwater
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the US healthcare system ... a completely free market I have read a lot of wrong things on HN, ranging from the merely misinformed to the willfully ignorant, but this might take the cake.
You are selectively re-arranging my words to create a different meaning. At no point did I say the US healthcare system was completely free.
Hint: if a half-dozen different people misinterpret your point, it's not them, it's you.
Re: How to Charge $546 for Six Liters of Saltwater
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
The sentence you're objecting to isn't claiming that US healthcare is a completely free market (which, as you note, would be an unbelievably ignorant view to hold... literally unbelievably). It's claiming that certain failures of the fairly-free US system already illustrate the sorts of failures that would plague a free(er) system. You may or may not agree with that conclusion, but it's a far more plausible view for…
"US healthcare system is in fact a perfect demonstration of the dangers of a completely free market" The commenter actually says exactly that...that the US healthcare system is (in fact) a perfect demonstration of a completely free market.
No, it is a comment about the idea that the failures come from it not being free enough.
Saying that something demonstrates the dangers of x by saying that the things that are wrong with it are features of it moving in the direction of x is not the same as saying that the thing is x.
I could say that something nearly catching fire and getting badly scorched is a perfect demonstration of the dangers of fire, but that would not mean that I think that the thing has actually caught fire, it just means that I am using a perfectly normal rhetorical device to describe that I think that the fire is a danger.
Re: How to Charge $546 for Six Liters of Saltwater
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are selectively re-arranging my words to create a different meaning. At no point did I say the US healthcare system was completely free.
Hint: if a half-dozen different people misinterpret your point, it's not them, it's you.
That also largely depends on if they are being wilfully obtuse, or lack the basic comprehension skills involved with recognising wider context beyond the level of single sentences, which seem to be the main two areas of confusion here so far.