[wfo]

No actually it does not. The government subsidizes food production and food for the poor HEAVILY.

Also food is cheap and plentiful to create.

And most importantly, food is easy to steal; the one important factor in a functioning free market libertarians tend to forget about is the natural control at the bottom, for the poor: if the poor need something in order to survive and can't afford it, they act as a check on greed and neoliberalism run amok by ignoring the fake magic pieces of paper that the wealthy wave around as tokens of power and take what they need.

It's a lot harder to steal health care so there's no incentive for the rich to modify the system to help the poor like there is with food.

[JoeAltmaier]

Maybe its similar. My last 30-day dose of blood pressure medicine cost be 54 cents. And the store had shelves full of medicine all around me, thousands of them, all easily pocketable.

[pdonis]

> The government subsidizes food production

Yes, and this is a bug, not a feature. Food would be cheaper if this were not done. The "subsidies" are to the food producers, to artifically keep prices up. The equivalent for health care would be subsidies to health care providers.

> and food for the poor

Yes, with food stamps. But nobody tells the poor what they have to spend the food stamps on, and nobody regulates grocery stores up one side and down the other telling them what food items they have to provide if they accept food stamps and what they have to charge for every single item. So this regulation is nothing at all like US health care regulation.

The equivalent of food stamps for health care would be to give poor people a flat sum of money per month on a "health care spending card" that they could use at any health care provider they wanted, for any service they wanted. And then no other regulation of health care providers--no rules about what services they have to provide, no regulation of prices, etc. I personally think this would be a significant improvement over the current US system.

> food is cheap and plentiful to create

Yes, and it would be cheaper if the government did not subsidize producers, as above. The reason for this is, of course, that there is a free market in food (or at least much closer to one than the market in health care) and so producers are competing on price, therefore driving them to make food production more and more efficient. A century ago in the US, food was not cheap and plentiful to create. Technology and production processes improve over time if they are forced to by competition. I see no reason why the same would not apply to health care, if it were competitive the way food production is.

> food is easy to steal

This is an interesting point, but I'm not sure how much difference it makes in itself, because even the richest person in the world can only consume a limited quantity of food. So it makes no difference to rich people whether the poor can steal food or not; even if they do, the rich won't be the one to suffer, someone much further down the income ladder will (if anyone does).

A more interesting aspect is this:

> It's a lot harder to steal health care

I would rephrase this as: health care is much less fungible than food is. You and I can trade lunches, but we can't trade, say, gallbladder operations or physical exams. I agree that this is potentially a valid reason to treat health care different from food. What might be helpful is to look at other goods or services that are not fungible and see how they are handled in comparison with health care.

[wfo]

Government subsidies are also responsible for a large part of the food production infrastructure -- not only is one of the biggest problems behind food transporting it from production to market, which is completely government subsidized (if food producers had to pay for the highways their trucks use/erode they would go out of business and not serve half the country) food not only is subsidized now, but HAS BEEN subsidized for every moment the industry has existed because it is a necessity. It is impossible to separate the food industry from government interference, they are permanently symbiotically joined. If food production can even now survive now without the government (it cannot in anything near its current form), this does not mean the progress we have today could have been made without it; it just means the government has done a good job of fostering and supporting the industry.

Food is heavily regulated, including the food bought by stamps. The government decides what can be purchased by the stamps, and every item of food sold in any store across the country is approved for safety and health. Without these regulations we would have massive constant food related deaths as producers compete on price and compromise safety to the detriment and possibly death of any customer who cannot afford the high quality "market regulated" product which is exactly what has happened in every unregulated industry in the history of the world. And for higher end products: the calculus of a PR cover up operation and possible civil suit vs. actually safely creating food is done by companies, and currently federal regulators weigh in on the side of 'you had better make this safe or else'. You are proposing pushing the balance here towards "well, if we can save a buck, screw it, we can tie the victims up in court until they go bankrupt and die anyway or blame it on the supply chain and promise we will do better" which makes safety much less important.

A health care spending card is perhaps a natural suggestion but is made all the more insidious because it is so. It is, in reality, an atrocious and murderous idea; the entire crux of health care is not only that it is essential to living and therefore has an infinite price and that quality is almost impossible for consumers to accurately assess but that needs for different people are drastically different, usually for reasons that have very little to do with their choices or desires, which is why it is generally taken care of by insurance while people do not buy "food insurance". Health care spending cards (or HSAs) are essentially a euphemism for condemning any poor person who gets sick to death.

And of course it makes a difference whether poor people can steal the food. Remember that unfettered free market capitalism is the system where a rich man's dog eats 5 course gourmet meals while his poor neighbor's child dies of hunger. Putting something necessary for survival behind an arbitrary chalked in line and saying "sorry, you don't get to have that because you weren't born rich and the neoliberal market economy has transitioned and has no room for your skillset, enjoy your one free death, maybe when you are reincarnated your father will be named Koch" is a very fast way to start riots and anarchy. The only reason the rich are rich is because the poor believe they are and act accordingly, we call this belief structure market society and government; shattering that necessary illusion will likely hurt everyone, but it most definitely hurts the rich. The point is that if food is available but inaccessible to the poor the free market and governmental structure in place will cease to exist -- the market and government have evolved in a very careful way to prevent this from happening.

[pdonis]

> It is impossible to separate the food industry from government interference, they are permanently symbiotically joined.

I'm sorry, but I don't buy this assertion of yours, and since we disagree on something so fundamental we're unlikely to be able to have a useful discussion.

> which is exactly what has happened in every unregulated industry in the history of the world.

This is an extremely strong claim which requires extremely strong evidence. Do you have any?

> the entire crux of health care is not only that it is essential to living and therefore has an infinite price

By this logic any action which carries any risk of reducing your life span and is not absolutely necessary should not be done. Do you live your life that way? Does anyone?

> unfettered free market capitalism is the system where a rich man's dog eats 5 course gourmet meals while his poor neighbor's child dies of hunger

This certainly happens in systems that are regulated by governments--such as ours. Where is your evidence that it happens, and is worse, in systems that are not regulated by governments?

> if food is available but inaccessible to the poor

In a free market, what would prevent the poor from producing their own food? In the US, historically, this is how most people got their food--they grew it or hunted it or fished for it themselves. Or they lived in small communities where everyone knew each other personally, so they knew the people producing their food. Our current system, in which almost all of us are dependent on a small number of food producers whom we don't know and cannot influence on our own, is, as you appear to agree, a product of massive government regulation--combined, as you conveniently forgot to state, with massive regulatory capture on the part of the corporations that own most of the food production capacity.

Yes, the government inspects food to see that it doesn't contain harmful microbes--but people knew how to do that before the government got into the act (if not, humans would have gone extinct long ago from food poisoning). The government also subsidizes the production of high fructose corn syrup and factory farmed meat and poultry. It subsidizes wheat and corn so that most of the US's acreage goes to those crops instead of a greater and healthier variety. (And then it subsidizes ethanol from corn so that we can burn food in our cars while poor people starve.) I could go on and on. Why does the government do all these things? Because it has the power to do it, and that power can be bought, and has been.

Of course this system, now that it exists and we are all caught in it, is by no means simple to escape from. But that does not mean it was inevitable, nor that it is good.

[maxerickson]

One of the motivations for Medicaid expansion in the ACA was to reduce the number of no-pay emergency room visits.