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Congress is set to ban most surprise medical bills

nytimes.com

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Re: Congress is set to ban most surprise medical bills

#431

Post by nickpp »

conanbatt wrote: post #379
iaw wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> has turned me from a pure free market thinking into a believer in single payer healthcare The current trend in 'free-market economics' is to call captured markets free and then argue for the relatively lax regulation. Most markets are not free markets and the healthcare definitely isn't. There's very little true choice, participants are typically under duress when seeking expensive services, and prices are hidden.…

A handy guide to check if healthcare is a free market: 1) Can you buy medicine from whoever sells it cheapest? 2) Can you hire the healthcare provider you want? 3) Are you financially punished for choosing your own health insurance? 4) Can you opt-out of government health services? 5) Can you waiver or partially waiver your right to sue the medical professional in exchange for cheaper services?

Also don’t forget the supply side: Can you open a healthcare service? Hospital? Medicine factory? If you actually have the required knowledge, how fast can you get the certifications to work as a healthcare provider?

Re: Congress is set to ban most surprise medical bills

#432

Post by nickpp »

kristopolous wrote: post #428
conanbatt wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Power is being used very loosely here. The power to use violence is very difference to the "power" you get from producing something that is so good that gives you a lot of leverage. The best way to beat a company that has market power is with other companies that fight in the same space or around it. And if there is one last man standing to reap profits from the victory, its again not necessarily bad. Market monopoli…

Nonsense. The absolutely last thing a company wants to do is compete. They avoid competition at all costs. The first instinct is to buy, then shut it down, then smother it out with sheer capital, then retreat either up or downmarket. That's why when you go in to the supermarket to look at commodities, they're often owned by either 1 or 2 companies that are mutually invested in each other. You see a bunch of brands, b…

What a bunch of baloney.

Enter any store in a free market economy and you’ll see a plethora of excellent products brought about by competition-driven innovation.

Enter any store in a planned-economy country and you’ll see empty shelves.

Re: Congress is set to ban most surprise medical bills

#433

Post by nickpp »

8note wrote: post #410
throwaway201103 wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All over the place. Many states have "anti-gouging" laws. https://www.fmi.org/docs/default-source/gr-state/price-gougi...

$1M for one single ply roll is no different than a empty shelf

But it brings out a lot of inventory...

Re: Congress is set to ban most surprise medical bills

#434

Post by kristopolous »

nickpp wrote: post #432
kristopolous wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nonsense. The absolutely last thing a company wants to do is compete. They avoid competition at all costs. The first instinct is to buy, then shut it down, then smother it out with sheer capital, then retreat either up or downmarket. That's why when you go in to the supermarket to look at commodities, they're often owned by either 1 or 2 companies that are mutually invested in each other. You see a bunch of brands, b…

What a bunch of baloney. Enter any store in a free market economy and you’ll see a plethora of excellent products brought about by competition-driven innovation. Enter any store in a planned-economy country and you’ll see empty shelves.

I completely reject your red-baiting witch-hunt assuming I'm a socialist because essentially all of mainstream modern economics have been calling the austrians out on their bullshit for almost 20 years now.

The ideal "free market" requires an insane level of planning.

Perfect knowledge. Perfect competition, no friction to switch loyalties, oversight of m&a to avoid the different classes of -opolies. Securing those rights are insanely complicated.

It's extremely bureaucratic and has vast overhead costs. Regulatory bodies, thousands of pages of rules, committees, it's insanely mind bogglingly planned.

That's why you need certified specialists to do anything in free market societies.

It's planned but this planning is not based on reality which is why everything keeps going crazy all the time.

The free market is a purely dogmatic ideological project, not based on any actual material evidence.

So I totally reject that bogus Hoover institute style premise.

These theoreticians set up a fraudulent spilt that doesn't exist, then states a false thing about them, and says 'ho take that'.

It's like someone trying to prove things with astrology charts. There's an internal logic to it but that actually doesn't matter because it's all disconnected fakery to begin with.

Re: Congress is set to ban most surprise medical bills

#435

Post by kristopolous »

conanbatt wrote: post #407
kristopolous wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every business offense I mentioned is orchestrated through government. As a tool of exploitation and enforcement, they're utterly inseparable. Concentrating the gain + spreading the cost requires both. Capital and governance (CG) have been the internal organs of the body politic forever. Hacker news, facebook, an elementary school, every institution is CG. The theoretical framework of free markets requires the fictio…

I agree with the notion that everything is related to governance, and free markets are not anarchy. But it is a proposal of a system that requires a set of rules, some nowadays unavoidably performed by government, but the key are the rules not the government. In any case, I see the same corruption you see, and the question is how to go about it. If the state is powerful and corruptible, I want a smaller state, with l…

My advocacy is to reject all dogmatic ideological frameworks, they are fundamentally the wrong approach.

"Smaller state, larger state" no... Those are answers without considering the questions.

Heterodoxy, material analysis, material goals, provable statements, methodologies of measurements and metrics...

That and not disconnected faith based theory opinions are what matter. Labeling things as whatever-alist is a just a silly sports game for tribalists as if it's more important to pass a purity test than it is to construct a positive functioning society.

Whether a solution makes the state bigger or smaller is irrelevant.

What is the efficacy for the effort trade-off, that's really it.

Any commitment to a theoretical purity sets one up for a blindness and bias of analysis and an easy way to be exploited.

That's why televangelists can so blatantly and openly rip people off. The purity theory blinds the faithful. This is true for socialism, capitalism, syndicalism, anarchism, all of them

Re: Congress is set to ban most surprise medical bills

#436

Post by nickpp »

kristopolous wrote: post #434
nickpp wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a bunch of baloney. Enter any store in a free market economy and you’ll see a plethora of excellent products brought about by competition-driven innovation. Enter any store in a planned-economy country and you’ll see empty shelves.

I completely reject your red-baiting witch-hunt assuming I'm a socialist because essentially all of mainstream modern economics have been calling the austrians out on their bullshit for almost 20 years now. The ideal "free market" requires an insane level of planning. Perfect knowledge. Perfect competition, no friction to switch loyalties, oversight of m&a to avoid the different classes of -opolies. Securing those ri…

Nobody is talking about your "ideal free market". I saw you mention it on another threads and let me make this clear: we are only talking about the regular, imperfect, free market. Free as in free of government interference, not some other ideal. Free as in everybody is free to participate.

And its not binary, either. You can have it completely free, freer, free-ish, all the way to lightly regulated, heavily regulated, planned and completely locked down.

Finally, I am not talking from economists' perspective, but from that of the regular guy on the street who is just able to see policies and their result. But my conclusion is extremely simple: the freer the market is the better everybody (other than profiteers, bureaucrats and politicians) is.

Re: Congress is set to ban most surprise medical bills

#437

Post by curtainsforus »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #272
curtainsforus wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DMCA

DMCA? Let's see... Does this example of a bad government regulation come from the government? Or the people voting and demanding it from the government? No, it comes from business. DMCA is an example of the badness of private business if allowed to do what it wants. That was a purchased law. The failure on the governments part was in allowing itself to be for sale. So you are right, even though I bet this is just abo…

Look, it's government power behind it. I don't fundamentally care how it's gotten rid of as long as it is. Weaken businesses, weaken the government, weaken the links between the two, whichever way is fastest/most effective- in principle. I just don't particularly trust your prescription, as you don't mine. This situation is, of course, exactly as the government-business complex wills it.

Re: Congress is set to ban most surprise medical bills

#438

Post by unishark »

8note wrote: post #399
unishark wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do go on. Why is dying due to an explicit action any more of a free choice than dying of an explicit inaction? Because one is coercion and the other is simply an economic system. Which by the way is also used for all the other necessities of life too. How about food? The whole point of a free market is competition, so if you were at least arguing for emergency situations there's be something to talk about since it'…

Coercion is simply an economic system too? I tell you to do work, and if you don't I shoot you. It's just economics; I'm trading not shooting you for your labour and everyone comes out happy

No, economic systems are a superset of systems with coercion, and also include systems without coercion. So when I said "simply" an economic system, I meant lacking in coercion. Your example includes both. Also it's silly to call it trade.

Were you making an analogy for the economics of socialized medicine with the forcing of labor?

Re: Congress is set to ban most surprise medical bills

#439

Post by wes-k »

OminousWeapons wrote: post #262
wes-k wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can buy short term insurance. It is outside of the healthcare market place and typically does no cover pre-existing conditions (you have to qualify for it). I actually switched to it 100% as the premiums are way cheaper and I just want insurance against million dollar fees on the low chance I get cancer or I'm in an accident.

Would you mind linking to where you did this?

https://nationalgeneral.com/ -- then you want some form of "short term" health insurance.

Re: Congress is set to ban most surprise medical bills

#440

Post by selimthegrim »

2Gkashmiri wrote: post #206
silentsea90 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public services in India, especially ones interacting with people en masse are terrible. No recourse but to go to private hospitals.

they are terrible because they are too less. other than that i would rather get treated in a government run hospital because they employ only the most capable of doctors, senior and otherwise. the problem isnt in the doctors. its infrastructure. i think people got my comment wrong way. i am very much in support of these hospitals. just that i want them to be in every major district rather than being restricted to maj…

What is happening with Ayushman Bharat in held Kashmir?
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