The healthcare industry disaster wasn't born out of regulatory control - though money does now follow the regulations. The disaster was born out of regulatory mistakes(in particular, look back to the 1940's when the govt made it tax free to offer health insurance as a benefit). [1]

The industry is an onion and in order to understand why it is the way it is today you need to peel back all of the layers that have been added by the govt over time and the unintended consequences of those.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/10/07/921287295/history-of-employer...

Regulatory capture is the issue that needs to be solved. Not free markets.

Free markets are the most efficient way for information to be transferred throughout the system.

Stricter campaign finance laws, ending revolving-door politics, etc.

But putting the blame on free markets seems like a mistake.

Wait, wait, wait--you're saying that we need to solve issues like regulatory capture through legislation... so that we can have a market without governmental interference (aka a "free market")? Huh?

You can't on the one hand tout the "free market", while on the other complain that we don't have the "right" kind of governmental interference.

Even if you could square that circle, it still sounds disingenuous to argue that we could have the most efficient system if only we were to eliminate _thing that said system actively encourages_. The failure is baked into the game, my friend.

I don’t think that reasoning is necessarily unsound. For there to be regulatory capture, there needs to be regulation. The legislation proposed could be to remove or minimize that regulation, and thus limit the ”hooks” whereby to capture it with. Replacing ”governmental interference” with ”less governmental interference”, not ”different governmental interference”.

I don’t take such a libertarian view myself, by the way. Just pointing out that I don’t think you can pick apart the argument of the person you replied to in that way.

Instead of advocating for and gambling on a "free market" health care system that has never been tried successfully anywhere, and hoping that it will work out (because dogma?), why not advocate for systems that have been tried all over the world that have been proven to work?

I'd sign up for a significant increase in my taxes if the US system were replaced by the system that I experienced in Belgium for the first 30 years of my life.

And by successfully, I mean: everybody, irrespective of income or status, can expect to get the care they need.

The free market healthcare system in the USA worked great up until regulations pushing out mutual aid societies completely changed it. Costs were affordable for everyone.

http://freenation.org/a/f12l3.html

It takes an exceptional breed of ignorance to say "just implement whatever <country> has" as if that is a silver bullet and that the same forces that caused the current debacle wouldn't also do their magic on anything we attempt to transition to.

If it was as easy as paying out way out of the problem we'd have done it already.

It also takes an exceptional amount of knee jerk assery to interpret my comment as "change the US system to the Belgian one". The Belgian system is one that works more or less from my experience. Most inhabitants of Germany, France, the Netherlands, and others will claim the same for theirs.

Nobody is claiming that the US should copy the system of some specific country verbatim. But it's equally dumb to dismiss the common traits of these other systems, and say "nah, let's do just the opposite."

>It also takes an exceptional amount of knee jerk assery to interpret my comment as "change the US system to the Belgian one"

Well you literally said "I'd sign up for a significant increase in my taxes if the US system were replaced by the system that I experienced in Belgium for the first 30 years of my life" so why don't you tell me how that was supposed to be interpreted?

America shares a very long border with a nation with a functional healthcare system and we generally prefer to compare to them.

I wrote "why not advocate for systems". Notice the plural form. Did you assume that by writing "all over the world", I actually meant the superpower of Belgium?

What all those systems have in common is that they are a mix of free market and strong regulation. The opposite of "let's do even more free market than what we have now."

I don't know how the US can get there. It's probably impossible, just like school shootings and the "No Way To Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens" argument.

Feels a lot like 'Real free markets have never been tried!' which we all know from its standard form on the left. If, at this point in history, real free markets have been unable to sustain themselves in the areas of the economy that people depend on the most (healthcare as a major example) then perhaps we ought to consider whether they're able to sustain themselves at all. I believe free markets and meritocracy are two systems commonly pointed to today that may be 'ideal' in one sense or another but which in practice cannot help but sow the seeds of their own destruction.

Markets exist by virtue of laws created by governments - property law being the primary example - expecting actors in a free market who aggregate enough wealth to affect those governments not to just strikes me as unrealistic. It reminds me a bit of gaming. Everyone agrees that in a competitive game the most fun part is early on before a 'meta' can be established. But of course that meta will always end up established and it's basically dumb to be mad at people for metagaming or to otherwise expect them not to.

Monopolization and regulatory capture are standard features of free markets, if you leaving them running long enough.

>Free markets are the most efficient way for information to be transferred throughout the system.

Would such a market allow NDAs?

The U.S. economy isn't unfettered free market, including in this sector. The policy is just bad.

I would say the drug cartels are about as close to free market capitalism as we have today. They are largely unregulated because they can either buy off the regulators / government, or fight them with armies.