[cs702]

"Current and former employees from at least 10 UHS hospitals in nine states said they were under pressure to fill beds by almost any method — which sometimes meant exaggerating people’s symptoms or twisting their words to make them seem suicidal — and to hold them until their insurance payments ran out."

Don't worry, free-market ideologues will coolly tell you. Their logic will seem airtight: over time, if Intake's psychiatric wards were really, truly locking up sane people who don't want to be locked up, the reputation of these facilities would no doubt have already suffered by now, and the company would have already been forced to close them. These incidents can only be isolated cases, regardless of the evidence. The profit motive will keep the company in check.

If you believe that, you haven't read the article.

[dang]

You've introduced an ideological talking point in order to refute it, but that's the sort of tangent we ask people not to introduce into divisive threads, because they usually turn into generic arguments/flamewars that overwhelm the (far more interesting) specifics of a story.

[cs702]

dang: that wasn't my intention, but rereading what I wrote, I must admit you're right. The story upset me and I overreacted. Please feel free to delete/hide my comment. I added a note to prevent upvoting for now.

[dang]

I'd never delete an exchange with so exemplary a recovery :)

[bskdjx]

Who are you referring to as free market ideologues? Many purport to be.

An anarco-capitalist (an anti-rand) libertarian flavor) rejects involuntary commitment as a matter of dogma. So these institutions cannot exist, even if they are following the "law".

Furthermore it is the state who has monopoly over violence that legitimizes this behavior (the history of physiology, involuntary commitment, and state violence is rich and fascinating).

Libertarians see this as violence over an individual. Not being the initiator of the violence, the victims have a full moral right to use violent means to defend themselves, up to and including deadly force.

Right or wrong, these "free market extremists" have a more nuanced position than "the market will sort it out"

[guscost]

Yeah, no kidding. We're talking about a situation where one party can coerce another into being a customer by kidnapping and imprisoning them. In what insane universe can you call that a "free market"?

[Jun8]

"Free-market", like many -isms may mean many different things to different people.

However, it seems clear that pressure to profit, pressure to grow fast, to raise ever larger rounds, etc. leads to huge missteps, both in tiny startups and in huge corporations. If you replace "beds" in that quote with "bank accounts" you get the Welles Fargo scandal. Ditto for Theranos. And these are only the very recent examples (that we know of).

[tdb7893]

I never fully understood free market ideologies because no market can ever really be "free" in the theoretical sense. "Free markets" are based off of a set of assumptions that can never quite be true.

[h4nkoslo]

That would actually be a convincing argument, if it weren't for the insurance coverage (private or government) they repeatedly mention. Seizing the person is just a prerequisite for getting the insurer to write the hospital a check; they're not the customer, they're the product.