Would you prefer the government to negotiate the price of your car for you? Markets are a powerful tool
There are merits to government price controls and there are certainly countries that have employed them successfully. That said, it isn’t the only solution to bending the cost curve, and there are also downsides to price controls. It’s complicated.
Government does that in the US (and the EU and Canada and basically every first world nation that's not a city state). The department of agriculture and others spend somewhere between 10s and 100s of billions every year to make sure that food (and other crop) prices stay within carefully set, tightly defined limits.
Healthcare is not just a demand-side issue. There is also constrained supply. I'd be happy to see the government subsidize supply production (building new medical schools etc) in a similar way that it subsidizes food production.
I'm by no means advocating government negotiation or single-payer or medicare-for-all as the thing the government must do on this issue. I'm fine with a form of intervention that allows the market forces to go the last mile in this.
Yes? We already do this? For many years directly in the postwar period and now indirectly through agriculture subsidies and programs like SNAP. Making sure everyone has enough to eat is step one of having any kind of functioning society and why it’s always been a source of massive government intervention in the economy.
Not being able to afford health care in no way condemns one to being killed. It's obviously not advisable, but plenty of people do just fine without regular doctor checkups because they keep healthy and live balanced lives. And, interestingly, given how many each year die in traffic accidents, it's not such a stretch that being _able_ to afford a car would kill you.
We all have really different reasons for wanting health insurance and owning a car. We have different components, considerations, and properties, which we value about these decisions. Given this, it seems ludicrously complex, inefficient, and cruel to subject all citizens of a nation to the same exact process of obtaining and using health care.
We all know how bad of an idea it is to centralize services, but because some linguistic jokesters have gotten the phrase "healthcare is a human right" to be passed around the globe enough times, people seem to drop context when it comes to this discussion.
As soon as youtube-dl got hit with its recent DMCA takedown request, GitHub obliged and the whole dang HN community lost their collective minds. "Decentralize your git repos" we all saw people writing - and they weren't wrong. But for reasons that continue to escape me during these awful lockdowns we're all facing, people don't seem to think that their government-provided healthcare workers and price negotiators will do anything of the sort.
Your website suggests you are American, so I recommend taking a look at the various healthcare systems on display in Europe, they're not all made equally (i.e. Some do more on behalf of their citizens than most). In my experience of watching American discussing healthcare in the EU, the subtleties are often lost, sadly.
Saying the market can solve the problem of healthcare for everyone is a bit like saying it should be able to solve the problem of providing flagship-quality phones for everyone. But in fact, given the "law" of supply & demand, a product like healthcare which is in demand by literally every single person, yet constrained by supply, the solution the market converges on is going to extract the most amount of money it can from however many customers can be served by the available supply.
Supply constraints are also one of the problems I would, given complete faith in market forces, expect the market to solve but it has not done that either. Market forces did not prevent or resolve the dumping of cancer-causing chemicals, or known cancer-causing product like cigarettes to be removed, or any number of other undesirable things whose costs end up being paid by society as a whole rather than a given individual(s) responsible for the problem. When the market fails to solve a problem, some other force needs to intervene.
Maybe a free market purist would say we didn't give it long enough to solve these problems. I don't believe that, but let's say it's true: Saying the market will eventually solve a problem, when human lives or suffering are at risk, is a bit like saying evolution will eventually solve a problem. It may be true, but the timescales involved are sufficiently long to render their eventual solution irrelevant to the people who die or suffer before it materializes.
I don't claim to know the best way to do this, and perhaps my analysis above is incomplete or over-simplified, but the point stands that the market has not solved this problem, and does not show signs of doing so.
I absolutely want the government to negotiate the cost of water, and electricity.
The concept of "markets" is not useful in a discussion about healthcare, because unlike other markets, a participant will often die unless they immediately purchase a good from the seller physically closest to them, regardless of price.
