Before, we had the (very poor) demand elasticity of people paying everything they had and then maxing out every credit source, and predictably prices rose to around that point. Now, we have no demand elasticity at all, and prices can be expected to rise well above the average person's net worth + credit access.
If you look at any microeconomic equilibrium chart, you'll see that the price is held in a balance between people buying and people holding off due to price. When the good is healthcare, the human cost of "holding off" is very high, and usually involves inability to pay. Unfortunately our economic system tends to fly off the rails if this balance is disrupted, no matter how noble or urgent the cause.
Elsewhere it has been said: choosing between bankruptcy for your family or cancer care for your child isn't an actual choice, it's two loaded guns pointed at your skull. One held by the hospital, the other by the insurance company.
The reason first world countries choose universal healthcare is that healthcare is a human right. Full stop. It is not an economic issue. If you want to get economic about it though you'll lose because as it turns out a healthy educated populace is more productive than one that loses productive families here and there to lances of bankruptcy from the unpredictable nest of human disease.
We were literally using lives as an economic mechanism, but now that we're not doing that we need to use something else in their place. The price of healthcare will continue to skyrocket unless we find something a little less horrifying than other people's lives to use as a balancing weight; although I won't claim to know whether it would be more possible to design a working market system or socialize it successfully.
Priority 1, stop making Soylent Green out of people. Priority 2, re-establish the food supply in a better way, because we need to eat.
I'm sure they said that in soviet Russia too. It's all good to say X,Y or Z is a right until you actually cash in on that right.
I mean you don't even have to look to the soviet union, what is goinig on with the VA? Obama was working to fix that smaller universal healthcare system from actually just waiting years for people to die but I haven't heard any good news comming out of there recently.
The rest of your claims are just nonsensical in this context since your just assuming universal healthcare works because the government decrees it to be universal.
I can probably predict the response but on the chance I'll be surprised - why can't America solve the problem when Taiwan, Switzerland, Sweden, France, Germany, the UK, Canada, Finland, Norway, etc etc etc have or nearly have?
(I have received healthcare in several of these countries and an readily prepared with counterpoints to the inaccurate "healthcare isn't good / lines are long in those countries" arguments, fair warning)
Humanity survived just fine without real healthcare and healthcare is not essential to a fair balance of power b/t the government and its citizenry.
Universal healthcare needs to be argued on the economics of the issue because that is the only practical way to make it sustainable. The "feel good" stuff about it being a human right will fail when stress is applied to America and stress is coming. The US, frankly, has peaked and it is all downhill from here.
Frankly a single payer system is simpler and faster. But this is an area where American politics and market rhetoric just lead to terrible outcomes.
“Universal right” is simply that which people feel all people ought to have.
> Humanity survived just fine without real healthcare and healthcare
“Universal healthcare” as a right is simply the right to a certain minimal level which is dependent on technology and resources. The fact that their have in the course of human history been times when no real healthcare by the standards of the early 21st century isn't material to that one way or the other.
> healthcare is not essential to a fair balance of power b/t the government and its citizenry.
That's quite arguably not the case; “government” is an a abstraction than the ultimately boils down to the subset of the citizenry with the most power in allocating resources, and it's quite arguable that that floors for allocation of resources in several domains, including healthcare, are essential for fair balance of power between that subset and the rest of the body of the citizenry.
Further, your implicit argument that a “universal human right” must either be something that prehistoric humans could not survive without or relate to balance of power between people and government is simply a statement of your political values, not a boundary on the what “makes sense” as a universal right.
> Universal healthcare needs to be argued on the economics of the issue because that is the only practical way to make it sustainable.
The actual concrete floor at any given time must be, but then again since every OECD country which guarantees universal healthcare, regardlesa of the details of the system, does it for less total (measured by absolute expenditures, per capita, or per GDP) than the US does spends on healthcare (and some don it for less by all three measures than the US spends in the. smaller public portion of its system alone, let alone the private expenditures), the economics aren't really an issue when you are talking about the US system.
This might be the case if hospitals had to actually show their prices rather than sending bills after the fact for a price you aren't allowed to know when you consent to treatment. It might also help if competition were allowed, but for hospitals it is pretty much not in a lot of states. To open a new hospital in many states, you need a "certificate of need", which is basically a document demonstrating that you won't be competing with the existing hospitals. So much for "free market health care".
Healthcare is a non typical market and the cost of a persons health is irrationally high to that person.
Everyone on a boat has twenty dollars and absolutely needs an EpiPen to live. You have a supply of EpiPens and want to get as much of their money as possible. There's zero elasticity between 0 and 20 dollars, but you better not charge $21!
Now, imagine that there was only one person who needed an EpiPen, but everyone else was willing to pitch in as much as it took to help them out. If the supplier of the medicine was perfectly evil, the price would be $20 times the number of people.
Perfect self-interest is a pretty good model of any industry, including pharma, so I think this is a good picture of the situation. The ACA was careful to keep something like a market system in place, which is why we're faced with a problem that can be understood with microeconomics.
Healthcare is known to be a market which has non standard policy imperatives
The cheapest, simplest and most effective system is single payer with everyone in a single pool.
Every major first world power achieves better outcomes for lower costs than America.
Your theoretical premise would have merit if this was only theoretical, and we had no real world evidence that this was a bad idea.
