Main reason I ask is because Chillindude, a prominent member of the competitive Melee community had a stroke recently and as he’s relatively healthy and works out often, he doesn’t have health insurance, and even though he’s sponsored by Team Liquid, one of the largest e-sports teams out there, because he is classified as an independent contractor, he doesn’t have health insurance through them.
The way he got the stroke was through an infection in his knee that he got misdiagnosed twice, and the hospital was going to throw him out even because he’s been stabilized, but doesn’t have coverage, which to me is actual BS but I’m honestly curious as to why this would be the case, considering strokes need so much recovery done for them.
Situations like this is part of why I couldn’t write my own thing for the ideal society post I made the other day, because I have no clue how healthcare should be handled. I do know however that portions of why healthcare is so expensive is due to the companies that make the equipment being anti-“Right to Repair” and the actual repair costs of the equipment being outrageous (Louis Rossmann made that a video months ago and I can’t find it), but still, this whole situation is really outrageous to me, that the hospital was going to throw him out after he stabilized due to a lack of proper coverage, and that stroke recovery as a whole is as expensive as it is in the US. I’d love to hear from our European people if it’s really any better there or am I being lied to, but still, idk what the solution really is.
Edit: I’m in the US, so this is pretty important for me to know.
The solution is to stop the state from interfering with healthcare. The insurance companies are not real capitalism, they are crony capitalism, and thus there is no real competition or incentive to provide a good service. They form a mafia style oligopoly.
The healthcare system subsidised via taxes, as in Europe, has the same problem. Public employees have no incentive to be good at their job, as their salary does not depend on that, and they are organised in unions (of mostly public employees) which turn the whole system into a mafia. Only worse because there is only one system: a monopoly.
The solution, you ask me, real capitalism, with no state interference at all. No permits, no hurdles to exercise your job. Let the health providers really compete.
We just had a massive roll-out of a vaccine which effectively side-stepped all of the regulations that normally are applied to a drug of that sort, and to no one's surprise it has more issues than normally occur with a drug of that sort. That is not a datapoint in favor of the "keep states from interfering" argument.
In my opinion the "keep the state from interfering" analysis misses the part where people do in fact screw up or act maliciously. One of the reasons we have a State is to punish people when they do so.
But I think part of the reason there's so much bureaucracy is that our government is largely incapable of punishing people when they screw up. If you make a drug that kills someone, at best the company gets fined or maybe a CEO gets a stay in Club Fed, but responsibility is so diffuse it's nearly impossible to actually punish to the degree it actually deters bad behavior.
So as a consequence of being unable to punish, instead the State takes a preventative approach where they structure things in a way where it's very difficult or impossible to make the sort of mistakes which they're incapable of punishing. Which is highly inefficient as it treats everyone as if they're incompetent or a bad actor, where the goal should be to treat the competent, good actors quite differently than the incompetent or bad actors. We all intuitively know this and act like this: you give extra scrutiny to the work of less experienced (or trustworthy) people than more experienced/trustworthy people.
Instead of removing the State's involvement completely, if we just changed its role to one of punishment I suspect that would make things much less burdensome. "If you signed off on this drug that injures a bunch of people, we're going to flog you in public. If it kills a bunch of people, we're just going to execute you. We'll let you decide how much risk you're willing to take to avoid those things."
The closest thing we have to that in the medical industry is when people who work in that industry personally use or have family that use the drugs and devices those people are responsible for producing. And those people in my experience take their jobs way more seriously than those who don't, because mistakes become something real and personal instead of statistics in an "adverse events" chart. But even then, sometimes they get overridden by people who don't.
The laws insulating vaccine manufacturers from lawsuits are basically the opposite, though, since they're preventing judicial consequences from reaching manufacturers of faulty goods.
I don't have an answer here really, but the state is actively protecting the producers of the Covid 'Vaccine.' So the base impulse to rip the state out of the equation by the roots is understandable, given present circumstances.
Yes, our State has a lot of bad incentives put in place, those vaccine laws very prominent among them.
And sometimes that impulse is healthy: elsewhere in this thread I mentioned that a main reason the American right opposes nationalized healthcare is that we know it will be run by our enemies.
But ultimately that response should be considered something more akin to a survival tactic instead of a goal unto itself.
Another thing to consider: whenever the right proposes actually punishing someone for doing bad things, its enemies accuse it of "big government". But a government that amounts to "do what you want, but if you harm people we're going to punish you in proportion to how much harm you did, up to taking your life" is going to be much smaller than one that attempts to regulate behavior up-front to minimize the ways you can harm people. Which is what we do now.
Imagine if instead of passing the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 -- which created the FDA -- we just tried and executed the heads of the food companies which were poisoning people and left the food companies which weren't alone.