[John_Innocent]

Anyone who identifies the problem and the solution is labeled a free market ideologue and ignored.

This is the solution:

http://www.ncpa.org/pdfs/st349.pdf

It's not a mystery why all of the industries suffering the cost disease are dominated by government.

[sigstoat]

For those not following the link, that paper is entitled "The Market for Medical Care Should Work Like Cosmetic Surgery". Having briefly skimmed it, it points out that the costs for cosmetic surgery have not grown nearly as fast as the costs for medical care in general.

The article certainly has its own opinion about why that's the case, but regardless, anyone trying to explain the increase in medical costs should have to address the facts. Cosmetic surgeons still need liability insurance, nurses, office space, medical training, operating room time, etc, etc. So the likelihood that any of those are contributing to rising medical costs is reduced.

[justinlaster]

>Cosmetic surgery provides price competition because patients pay the bills.

Is this supposed to be satire? Do I even need to explain how ridiculous this stance is? I'll save my energy until I get a resounding "yes."

[loeg]

Yes, it seems clear from the downvotes that you need to explain your dismissal.

[justinlaster]

It's at -1. I really should not need to explain why a luxury service is not at all analogous to a service that deals with life-threatening, chronic conditions with a population that may not always have the means to pay especially when that payment amount is built off of a shadow market place and several entities which are notorious for not giving a flying shit about people.

Don't be silly.

[John_Innocent]

Having the means to pay and needing the service for life or death reasons have nothing do with the forces that drive costs down, namely consumers bargain hunting for the lowest price service that offers adequate an level of quality. Neither being poor nor needing a service for a life-or-death reasons. will prevent consumer from bargain hunting. The factors are orthogonal to those that affect cost trends.

You're failing to see that mechanics behind the evolution of consumer markets that lead to prices being driven down. Combined with your rude and arrogant dismissal of the link, your attitude embodies everything that is wrong with our political system and that prevents solutions from being found and implemented.

[justinlaster]

>You're failing to see that mechanics behind the evolution of consumer markets that lead to prices being driven down.

How so? If anything, I succinctly recognized these so-called mechanics are really just symptoms of other underlying actions and motivations. The PDF wants to pretend like it's looking at market forces, while completely ignoring some fundamental economic theories.

>Combined with your rude and arrogant dismissal of the link, your attitude embodies everything that is wrong with our political system and that prevents solutions from being found and implemented.

Your personal appeals to however insulted you feel or however blunt my response was isn't going to make anything that was stated in your comment or in the link any more substantive than it already is not.

Upon further investigation, the NCPA is a completely biased think-tank whose explicit goals are apparently "to develop and promote private alternatives to government regulation and control." I've never even heard of the NCPA, but the whole contrived tone of the PDF immediately spiked my bullshit meter.

I'm sorry you think you can get away with espousing complete drivel that needs to cherry-pick information to push forward a narrative, contrary to the experiences of the rest of the world. I have a feeling the more and more I'm going to look into this perspective, the less friendly this conversation is going to become. At this point, I have zero tolerance for intellectual dishonesty.

[John_Innocent]

"I succinctly recognized these so-called mechanics are really just symptoms of other underlying actions and motivations. "

I have no idea what that means or what you're referring to. You still haven't addressed any of the arguments I made.

Once more, my response to your argument:

>Having the means to pay and needing the service for life or death reasons have nothing do with the forces that drive costs down, namely consumers bargain hunting for the lowest price service that offers adequate an level of quality. Neither being poor nor needing a service for a life-or-death reasons, will prevent consumers from bargain hunting. The factors are orthogonal to those that affect cost trends.

All you've done is try to justify the unscientific response you provided to my comment, which contains only ad hominem ideological name-calling about the source, rather than addressing the facts it listed and logic it offered.

To recap: you've had a viscerally emotional response, where you engaged in totally rude and intellectually dishonest behaviour against me, all because the argument I made is for the free market, and the party I cited believes in the free market. This embodies everything wrong with our political system.