Crap like this is why I'm cautiously in favor of Medicare for all. The free market approach doesn't work for healthcare—the incentives are all wrong. It would also decouple health insurance from employment which would be beneficial to workers. (Health insurance as a benefit of employment is a post-WW II anachronism.) Making it easier to switch jobs would increase competition for labor and remove the incentive for employers to limit hours, which drives people to work 2-3 jobs.

@Michael Carman +1

@Michael Carman, I could not agree more. I've said for some time now that while I do not consider it necessarily the responsibility of government to provide healthcare, it IS government's responsibility to ensure that all of its citizens have health care. Any government that does not do so is failing in its responsibility to serve the public good.

Yes. Yes to all of this.

+1

I am not opposed to financial incentives in the healthcare market on total principle. But I am completely behind demanding a complete overhaul of what incentives the market actually experiences.

Lulbaterian assholes will probably disagree, as usual, but the fact is - the free market cannot act ethically unless ethical behavior is applied as a thorough, crushing, incentive on it.

I wouldn't say that the free market cannot act ethically.

However, in the free market as conceived by greed-first capitalists and Randian utilitarians, there are damned few incentives to act ethically and plenty of incentives not to.

I would say that unless you impose an incentive directly tied to ethical behavior, the free market cannot guarantee ethical behavior, and in fact probably won't provide it. Yes, it might - if you get lucky and ethical behavior also aims toward improving financials or the like. But betting on luck with something this important is not a good idea even if the odds are in your favor...and they're not.

Well ...
Actually, it might be argued there that the problem is people don't think nearly far enough ahead. There is a thing called the Principle of Enlightened Self-Interest, which could be summarized as "What goes around, comes around", or perhaps more crudely as "Shitting in the swimming pool isn't such a great idea when you have to swim in it too." Far too may people, when a bunch of money is waved in their face, simply do not think about what the long-term consequences will be to themselves, their children, their grandchildren. All they see is "Hey, I could have that money RIGHT NOW."

But yeah, whatever the reasons, the practical odds are heavily against almost any business choosing the long-term public good over its own profits.

Phil - yep! That's definitely part of it. I can do X today, I'll worry about tomorrow tomorrow, oops. Turns out that was a bad idea.... Sigh.

@Phil Stracchino I'd say that is precisely the problem at hand. Worse, it's kinda understandable - our mind was never wired for advanced long-term interest. Fundamentally, we are creatures set up after the principle "gorge today, fuck tonight, starve tomorrow, dead soon after". Survival envelope considerations of 50+ years never factored into our evolutionary development of the reward functions our brain supports.

As for RE "what goes around, comes around" - well, libertarians like to rave about the evil govenment regulations so often. I've come to argue that that is market pushback - pushback from the small customers and citizens who demand that these greedy assholes of corporate interests be reigned in. It's just market power by a wholesale different avenue.