[byrneseyeview]

Also the idea of big companies profiting from illness is not good IMHO

Ah. You know, I never really thought about how when I buy food, I am helping big corporations profit from hunger; when I buy books, I am helping big corporations profit from ignorance; when I buy clothes, I help big corporations profit from the wrath of nature. Fortunately, I am more concerned with getting what I want than with worrying that someone might, as a terrible side effect, benefit from my actions.

something as basic as health insurance should be something that is 'free' for everyone regardless of their circumstances.

But it's only 'free' because the necessary resources are taken away from other people. Saying you are entitled to healthcare is saying that no doctor or nurse is entitled to their own time -- it's yours, until you declare yourself satisfied with the health care you've gotten. Similarly, no researcher is entitled to his own ideas, property rights dissolve when the property is something you want but for which you are unwilling to bargain, etc. That is barbaric.

In the US you pay a massive amount towards warfare - I don't think that is a good thing.

Neither do I. Unfortunately, the cheap kinds of war are unpopular.

[axod]

Your argument is bogus. Food is an ongoing thing. We never stop being hungry. We always need food.

Medicine however, we need as long as we are sick. Therefore, there's quite an incentive for medical companies to keep us sick so we'll keep using their medicine.

Doesn't that worry you? Don't you see a sort of conflict of interests there between them wanting to cure you, and them wanting to make money?

If they develop a one shot cure that is cheap, and an ongoing vaccine that people need once a year, obviously they'll hide the cheap cure, and get you to sign up for once a year medicine, because it'll make them more money.

[byrneseyeview]

Golly. It's amazing that every single provider of healthcare would conspire to keep me sick, so I would never notice that customers of health care company A are healthier than customers of B. That kind of conspiracy would be a little bit totally unprecedented in all of human history and impossible to initiate, much less maintain. But I concede the possibility.

If that's true for private enterprises, why is it not true for the government? If a politician can make me reliant on him forever, why won't he do it?

If they develop a one shot cure that is cheap, and an ongoing vaccine that people need once a year, obviously they'll hide the cheap cure, and get you to sign up for once a year medicine, because it'll make them more money.

If there's only one 'them' (as in the government example) that is true. If there are many 'thems', and a new 'them' can be started for fairly little money, one would expect someone who developed such a cure to market it independently. Yes, a multi-million dollar lump sum from curing everything is less than the billions of dollars in revenue generated by health care companies. But 100% of that lump sum is more than this researcher could expect from the companies.

On a startup-related discussion site, it's pretty foolish for you to argue that nobody will ever market the cheaper, better solution, and that we'll always be beholden to the big companies. Nobody here believes that about software -- do you?

[axod]

Another bogus argument... You assume that others know about the cheaper better cures.

Software is just building stuff. It's easy.

If you don't build X, someone else can. But if you hide cure X for an illness, there's nothing to say that anyone else will find that cure at all - ever.

The statistics speak for themselves. Countries with government provided healthcare pay less on healthcare, and have a higher life expectancy.