Comments on: Health Care Dilemma: Cost Control vs. Profit Maximization

By: The House’s Proposed Surcharge on the Rich: Not Progressive Enough : HEALTH REFORM WATCH

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 05:34:41 +0000

[...] coverage to millions of workers. Second, inequality itself exacerbates the health care crisis, by fueling the allocation of medical care according to profit potential, not need. Third, inequality causes health problems, because societies grow “more [...]

By: Maryland Conservatarian

Maryland Conservatarian — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 01:44:21 +0000

“Kuttner paints a stark picture of a more market-driven system. It will divert ever more resources to those best able to pay. It will ever more “efficiently” deny care to those who cannot. Isn’t that the entire point of conditioning access to care on ability to pay?”

interesting – would the same model apply to, say, law professors? How many of the Clinton/Obama contingent posting here would NOT chuck your current law school for a more prestigous and higher paying position at Harvard or Yale? How would that impact the poor unfortunates at your current schools.

My primary law practice experience is in Criminal Defense and let’s just say it doesn’t take a calculator to add up the number of graduates from the so-called top schools I’ve run into at the various court houses. How about if we experiment with more government control of the legal practice such that even the poor schlubs running through District Court in Baltimore are afforded legal representation by the likes of a Harvard or Yale Law grad or even a law professor. This would help overcome one more dire consequences of our market-driven legal system – the lack of access for many to lawyers with all the answers. If that works out painlessly, count me in as amenable to considering lawyer-run medical care.

By: Michael Parente

Michael Parente — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 21:19:08 +0000

Is an upscale market for ’boutique’ healthcare services a harmful consequence of market forces or a benefit? In most markets, luxury products tend to become midscale (and eventually low-scale) over time.

Rawl’s veil of ignorance might provide an interesting application here. If you don’t know your position in the economy 100 years from now, would you rather land in an environment in which a relatively free-market for health care had predominated over the intervening 100 years or one in which the government had controlled healthcare services over that same period?

By: Patrick S. O'Donnell

Patrick S. O'Donnell — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 17:29:12 +0000

erratum: “In short, you are….”

By: Patrick S. O'Donnell

Patrick S. O'Donnell — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 17:27:23 +0000

Oh Frank, just admit you’re a communist and be done with it! Apparently there was not enough Ayn Rand in your school’s curriculum: shame on them. Perhaps when the quotient of suffering around you becomes so unbearable as to defy all description, you will appreciate the invisible hand of the marketplace as the omniscient, omnibenevolent, and omnipotent force that it truly is. Your stubborn refusal to bow down before the temple of unfettered capitalism is disconcerting, to say the least, as are your totalitarian proposals for reforming our health care system. What is more, and perhaps the root of your inexcusable ignorance and wallowing in illusion, is the unabashed and recalcitrant intransigence you display in the failure to recognize the unqualified virtues of Mammon. In short, your are an Idealist and Utopian and thus an imminent threat to both God and country.