| > Maybe you are confused because you chose a specific example wherein the expected number of treatments required is less than one? In my example 10 people out of 1000 required the treatment. If it's 100 people, then 1 will need it. You must have misread. > Your lack of intuition about such a simple linear relationship should be extremely concerning to you That's very condescending and a bit ironic. I think you should apologize. > much more reflective of left-wing ideology "Left" means different things in different places. In my country, a big chunk of the people on the "right" feel the same way you feel about the army, but about healthcare. Which is that some things like life-threatening problems are too important to let personal gain interfere. More on that in a second. > actual conditions on the ground I am writing this from the ground. My son just got treated by our public health system twice this week - the last one today. (His pediatrician was on strike today, actually. That is a bit inconvenient for us but it is fine. It's not life or death). My sister in law got diagnosed with cancer and got treatment for it. This is reality that I am telling you is happening right now. Not a theoretical thing that I am imagining might work on a communist country. It exists, and it works. For the life-threatening cases at least. It is not perfect - there's sometimes long waiting lists for non-life-threatening ones. That is where private health plays a role. Those who don't want to wait, or want a private room in the hospital, can pay for it. But if you are poor and you get cancer you don't necessarily die. Your family doesn't have to beg in gofundme for your treatment, nor they are left bankrupt. Which is absolutely a reality in the US. > The nature of democracy gives outsized influence public sector unions and interest groups that can then turn around and contribute a share of those benefits back to politicians campaigns. In contrast, a competitive market affords consumers to actually make demands with some weight behind them. I prefer referring to people as people. Or, citizens, in the context of a country. Perhaps that is where our difference of opinion comes from. I don't see a country as a business. So naturally its people are not "consumers". Poor people may not be able to consume much, but they are still people. On buying public administrators: in my country, lobbying consists in "having meetings with politicians". It does not mean "giving presents" or "contributing to campaigns". That is called bribing, and is against the law. Again, not a perfect system by any means. There's plenty of corruption, as well as other problems. One of them, and one of the places where I do agree with you, is that that interest groups (especially those sponsored by the extremely wealthy) still have much more levers to pull than the average person. Where I differ with you is in how to fix this. You propose that "people vote with their wallet". The problem with that is that the money that consumers use to vote with their wallet eventually goes into the pockets of the ones funding the interest groups that eventually make laws against them. This is a problem both in my country and in the US. It gets worse with inequality, which is getting worse everywhere, but especially in the US. My proposed solution is simply that there's other things besides the consumer-producer relationship. This doesn't necessarily imply a communist regime or an anarchist revolution. It just means Europe, man. |