[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.

[justinlaster]

I did address it, and you are ignoring it. I honestly do not care how insulted you are, or how rude you think I am. You removed any right to be cordially addressed when you pushed non-sense into this board, and then had the audacity to actually treat it as if you were being scientific.

Part of being scientific is asking your own position, "What does this look like if the theory is wrong?" It's called falsifiability. If the PDF you linked had the intellectual capacity and honesty to ask themselves that, then the PDF would have never been published.

Yet you nor the paper have yet to realize, again, some pretty fundamental economic concepts that explain the paper as a whole and why it's completely irrelevant to the conversation at large.

>because the argument I made is for the free market, and the party I cited believes in the free market.

No because they put their blinders on and didn't bother to actually look at any other direction except for the one they wanted to see.

Allow me to be completely straight-forward with my final words: fuck off with your unscientific, dishonest drivel.

[dang]

> fuck off with your unscientific, dishonest drivel.

We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking HN's civility rule. That's not allowed here.

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[John_Innocent]

>I did address it, and you are ignoring it. I honestly do not care how insulted you are, or how rude you think I am.

That's simply untrue. Where did you address it. Let me reiterate, you have not responded to this:

>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.

This was my rebuttal to your argument, and to date, has not been addressed. You falsely claim you addressed it and then quickly went back to your rude, anti-intellectual ranting.

>You removed any right to be cordially addressed when you pushed non-sense into this board, and then had the audacity to actually treat it as if you were being scientific.

You're displaying an unscientific and demagogic attitude, where you justify belligence with your own subjective determination that a party's argument is "nonsense".

>Part of being scientific is asking your own position, "What does this look like if the theory is wrong?" It's called falsifiability.

That's obvious and doesn't need to be stated. If cosmetic surgery prices had increased as much as procedures in other fields of medicine, that would count as evidence against the theory that a consumer market drives prices down. The article didn't need to pose that question because the evidence doesn't falsify its theory.

>No because they put their blinders on and didn't bother to actually look at any other direction except for the one they wanted to see.

You're making assumptions, not evidence-based arguments.

Like I said, you have not addressed the arguments I've made, and you have behaved like a putelent child, in being rude and trying to justify your rudeness.

Look I get it. I understand how you feel. You see some POS free market ideologue arguing that the free market is what we need in healthcare, when we've all seen that Europe's government run healthcare vastly outperforms the capitalist US healthcare system at a fraction of the cost. You wonder how someone could be so blind to facts, and so indoctrinated by simplistic ideology that is promoted by the American right and its bevy of propaganda-spewing think thanks. You see POSs like this polluting the minds of the public with their pseudo-religous free market dogma, and preventing far better public options - that would save lives and cost less, while guaranteeing universal coverage - from gaining the critical public support needed to be implemented.

I know where you're coming from, and if only you had an open mind, I could explain why your assumptions are wrong.