1. booksofthought: The best cure would be to get government out of this business altogether! Government involvement in anything sends costs rising. The only system that efficiently allocates resources to the people who need them, when they need them, is the free market. No. Removing government out of health care is not going to create a so-called ‘free market’. A few reasons why there will never be a free-market of health care: -Power: removing government still doesn’t remove the asymmetry of power between medical big-business and consumers. Further, advertisement of products and the construction of norms, not to mention the behaviour-disciplining status of medical discourse itself, upsets the price mechanism. -Asymmetry of information (related to the last point) -Organic resistance: the complete commodification of medical services requires such a dislocation of social understandings of the social role of medicine that it will always be met by regulation and collective action, such that the price-mechanism will never be efficient. Unless there is some sort of concerted social re-engineering*, this will always happen. Free-markets are so demanding and peculiar that they do not often exist. Now, given that there is a health service industry that could be further liberalized (but never laissez-faire) or further socialized, is it really scrupulous to presuppose an efficient model of perfect competition as the bench mark? Only if prior teleological commitments are smuggled in. [* perhaps by the imperial propagation of neoliberal economic orthodoxy? Oh wait, that’s already happening…]

    booksofthought:

    The best cure would be to get government out of this business altogether! Government involvement in anything sends costs rising. The only system that efficiently allocates resources to the people who need them, when they need them, is the free market.

    No. Removing government out of health care is not going to create a so-called ‘free market’.

    A few reasons why there will never be a free-market of health care:

    • -Power: removing government still doesn’t remove the asymmetry of power between medical big-business and consumers. Further, advertisement of products and the construction of norms, not to mention the behaviour-disciplining status of medical discourse itself, upsets the price mechanism.
    • -Asymmetry of information (related to the last point)
    • -Organic resistance: the complete commodification of medical services requires such a dislocation of social understandings of the social role of medicine that it will always be met by regulation and collective action, such that the price-mechanism will never be efficient. Unless there is some sort of concerted social re-engineering*, this will always happen.

    Free-markets are so demanding and peculiar that they do not often exist. Now, given that there is a health service industry that could be further liberalized (but never laissez-faire) or further socialized, is it really scrupulous to presuppose an efficient model of perfect competition as the bench mark? Only if prior teleological commitments are smuggled in.

    [* perhaps by the imperial propagation of neoliberal economic orthodoxy? Oh wait, that’s already happening…]

    (Source: absurdreasoning)

    2. 6 months ago  Notes (134)
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