I am officially distubed by the truth of U.S healthcare.

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Sorry for the tangent, but I just had to correct this. Powder cocaine, or cocaine hydrochloride, cannot be smoked as is, in that form it just burns without producing any effect. Smoking is a more efficient delivery system for cocaine than snorting it, so less goes further, but the older free-base method of converting it to a form that could be smoked removed *all* the impurities, including the margin providing cut, and thus was not profitable to the dealer. Crack is basically a bastard child of free-base with several steps removed, so that the product is cocaine that can be smoked while still carrying the cut. Therefore, "uncut crack" is inherently an oxymoron, as being stepped on is the raison d'etre of crack. See, you learn something everyday here .

Yeah I'm aware that crack has to be cut with baking soda or some other filler, but my point was about No True Scotsmanning. Crack could be 90% pure and you can say it isn't real crack, just like a market could have a single red tape and you can say it isn't a real free market it's crony capitalism. A free market needs some sort of regulation (anti-trust laws at the very least) to function just like crack needs some sort of filler to be cooked. A free market doesn't have to be 100% unregulated to be a real free market.

Looks more like AceOfSpades deflated your argument. He's right about the fact we don't have a free market system in the healthcare industry in the US.

Ok what sort of system in the healthcare industry do we have...looks pretty free market based to me. I mean its all profit drivin which is well f*cked up. Insurance companies denying people coverage because they have a pre-existing condition all because they might loose a little money when it comes to helping that person who would be paying into the freaking insurance in the first place........healthcare is a nessisity it should not be treated as a product or privlege.

Medicare and the EMTLA (sp?) bill that prevents hospitals from throwing people out of the ER are examples of Government intervention for the greater good. Insurance companies also have anti-trust exemptions and there isn't any federal oversight when it comes to insurance companies covering people across state lines. The former is an example of Government intervention for the greater good of insurance companies while the latter is the result of the Government leaving the regulation to the states rather than federal law which makes no sense. I mean if you jack a car and go into another state, it becomes a federal offense. Likewise if you buy insurance across state lines, the regulations should be under federal jurisdiction rather than some jumbled up states rights mess.

The US health care system isn't that much of a free market but I'm not saying the solution is to make it freer. I'm a believer in public healthcare with a private option. But anyways my point is that not every problem with the health care system can be traced back to Government intervention one way or the other. It is very likely that health care is inherently unsuitable as a free market because of imperfect competition and inelastic demand (Everyone is in demand of health care). Well there's the argument that people would only get health care when they need to which would reduce demand since less people would go to the ER for coughs and bruises, but first off I haven't seen any proof that this is the norm and secondly I haven't seen any proof that this is a major cause of the costs in health care.

Anyways I don't exactly have a dog in the fight. I would have to look into the issue more deeply but I'm on shaky grounds right now and although I believe in a public health care system, it's too complicated of an issue for me to be dead certain in my stance. The issue is far more complicated than all the rhetoric about evil capitalism or McCarthyist paranoia.

I was saying I like the idea of public healthcare, I thought you where saying public or universal healthcare would be a bad thing which is how I was responding...

Oh that explains the communist greater good remark, it confused me a bit. I didn't say it was a bad thing, it seems to work fine in my country. I was just clearing up the confusion that cave had about what wcoltd said. You misread my post since I said that there are problems within health care that have nothing to do with Government intervention one way or the other such as inelastic demand and imperfect competition. I'll add that since there are fewer health care establishments (hospital, clinics, doctor's offices) than say grocery stores, this is what leads to imperfect competition. There isn't a hospital every 4 blocks, so in the event of an emergency you aren't going to the best hospital, you're going to the nearest one which also makes the demand dependent on proximity rather than quality of care. This is why I think universal healthcare is the way to go. I am pro-free market, but I don't think it works with health care.

well that does make more sense, I guess I did kinda misread your post.

That, and government programs and intervention frankly make things worse.

People don't realize that without the "marketplace" working naturally (no interference), the forces that keep costs lower don't function.

I remember when seeing a doctor cost about $30. Now it's almost $200. WHY? Insurance. Insurance makes the doctor agree to a percentage of "usual and customary" charges. So, if that doctor NEEDS $50 and is going to be capped at 25%, he must raise his prices to get what he needs. It's not enough to just say, "Hey, I need $50 per visit to justify keeping my door open." Insurance will insist on him taking 25% of $50. So, he just bumps up his prices to get the $50 he needs. This is happening all over.

Government health care programs pay for all kinds of stuff on little more than a doctor's note....no documentation that it's really needed. $400 boot for your injured foot doesn't do squat? Government doesn't insist on a refund for the useless product. If you paid $400 out of your pocket, you'd scream for a refund.

LASIK surgery IS NOT covered by health insurance. It was very expensive when it came out. Now, LASIK centers are popping up all over and the price has come down IN SPITE OF inflation. WHY? It is because these doctors want customers, so they find ways to do the service cheaper and better. That nobody would pay for an "elective" procedure means they won't have a business if they can't meet the price demands of the consumer base.

Translate this to education (high prices because of "easy" student loans from the government) or any other field where prices have been skyrocketing. If the end user (the consumer) isn't paying out of pocket, the normal economic check on the supplier is distorted. Education would come WAY DOWN in price if government provided no easy way to pay for the costs. If schools wanted to stay open, they'd have to find ways to attract students on a budget and give them a quality education without all the expense. So long as someone will pay the bill for the consumer, there is little incentive to not raise prices and maintain the status quo.

Look at most college campuses and see how the faculty function....they do not follow the realities of a competitive business. They don't have to so long as they can keep packing butts in the seats each year.

Oh, I know what you were going for with the No True Scotsman analogy, but I'm just always interested in popular perceptions of drugs vs reality, or in my case personal experience gained through shady acquaintances and such over the years. What I was trying to point out was that there is no such thing as "uncut" crack, it's all cut otherwise it would be called freebase, or ready-rock if you're old school. The baking soda actually isn't what it's cut with, it's used as a reagent in a chemical reaction to convert snortable cocaine into smokable cocaine, it has nothing to do with the actual final purity the product takes. It takes less actual cocaine to get high by smoking than by snorting, so rock can be sold cheaper than powder and still maintain a high margin. This is what a lot of people don't understand about crack and it's impact on crime, it wasn't the drug itself that was so dangerous, it was the low price point and the way it was marketed.
Anyway, I suppose I could have been much more succinct by simply saying "there is no such thing as uncut crack" and pointing out that the analogy would hold with powder cocaine or heroin, but where's the fun in that?

Favoring corporate interests is not equal to free market captalism, technically when corporate interests are aligned with the state it's called fascism, free market capatilism implies the separation between the state and economics. in the case of medicare fascism seems worse than socialism - when you look at it on the surface - but again you have no metric for the things that are really important, namely the progress in the medical fields.

If the more costly U.S. system is innovating more, - you might make the argument that the U.S. system is better. All countries benefit from that innovation while the U.S. bears the cost. If progress in the medical field is the metric to define how good a medical system is, I would argue the United States is one of the best.

U.S. health care is not precisely free-market capitalist because the consumer has no opportunity to shop around, or even know before-hand what anything costs.

All these numbers are calculated in the background and doctors themselves generally don't have any idea what to tell a patient about them if they asked.

On top of that, if anything goes wrong, a patient can sue for malpractice and "did not use the best available" is often a compelling argument.

There is no ability or incentive for either side of the transaction to understand a cost/benefit ratio.

Agreed, maybe we should start having other countries pay us royalties for using our medical innovations, that would go a long way towards dealing with the cost issue.

America has always been a Social Darwinist kinda place. But I admit, with the economy tanking, the injustices really show up more.

Everything should not follow the 'competative buisness model' especially not healthcare....that competive buisness model is not so kind to people who cannot afford health insurance and certainly cannot afford medical care without that insurance they cannot afford......I do not think we should have insurance companies, Why do we need buisnesses people pay to screw them over when it matters worse and how can anyone knowingly pay into companies like this knowing they make more profit the more they deny people coverage so their goal is essentially deny coverage and take peoples money while trying to find a way out of ever covering anything.