Quote:I'm not sure what makes a "single payer government run system" better.There's an old 1963 paper by Kenneth Arrow that Krugman mentioned awhile back that lists some of the reasons why the market in health care is particularly prone to market failure. But one of the big ones is right here:
Quote:The problem is clear. If beer was free, we'd drink all the time.Not only is this not true in the case you cite (Alcohol has serious consequences which many people forego voluntarily, even in the case of free booze), it's not true of health care either. If someone offers me a free vacation next summer, I'll take it. If they offered me three, I'd take those as well. But if someone offers me a free heart transplant, I almost certainly wouldn't take it. And even if I needed one, I certainly wouldn't take three.
It just doesn't work the way other products do. You don't know what you need, but the amount of money you could spend finding out is limitless. You don't want the product, and you don't even know if you'll ever want the product, until you desperately need it, at which point, it's extremely expensive. There are huge information asymmetries and incentive issues among doctors, patients, insurers, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and everyone else in this crazy game. It's not like buying beer.
-Jester
Edit: My mother would chide me for using "between" when I meant "among".