I knew of certain defunct malls that decided to get rid of things that doesn't make money and only keep the high profit inventories.
Soon people stopped coming and they went under..
It's a bit harder for me to see this as an acceptable approach to health care. Not every segment of the economy needs to be a constant drunkard's walk in search of maximum profitability in the aggregate. Sometimes what the public actually desires is stability and reliability.
I had a friend who ran an unprofitable arcade for some time. His trash was nothing but food and drinks from other local businesses, particularly piles of bubble tea cups from a place across the street. It seemed rather likely it was worth paying him a bit to stay there.
Businesses exist to give us what we want. Those that do it well are profitable, those that don’t aren’t.
Keep in mind that the effort spent to make healthcare more stable could have instead been used to provide more healthcare overall. Or something else entirely, like shoes or haircuts.
All services are not as good as they could be, because the effort beyond “good enough” gets shifted to some other more valuable purpose, where things are not good enough yet.
Given that the USA pays higher-than-average prices for poorer-than-average outcomes, I'd say this is a spurious hypothetical, mostly useful for helping to demarcate the point where economics ceases to be an empirical, scientific pursuit and instead becomes a sort of low-rigor offshoot of moral philosophy.
But, back in the realm of epiricism, we know that this is one of those situations where closer government regulation can produce higher quality of service at lower cost, because the rest of the developed world has figured out multiple successful formulae for doing so. The only clear downside, if you can call it that, is that their hospital administrators don't seem to have quite such large collections of luxury watches.
Most people realize that a business will only change if a significant portion of buyers change their spending habits, and individually choosing to not support a business out of ethical concerns only hurts themselves.
Then there ends up being a lot of people who buy products from businesses they hate, and would support collective action against those businesses, like passing laws.
People like that aren't dumb, they are just trying to work around how their next best option is so much worse than buying the original product.
> Soon people stopped coming
Ah, yes. Why didn't we think of this before? By increasing the cost of (geriatric) healthcare, we can destroy demand. That's how supply/demand curves work right? In this way the invisible hand delivers unto us a fountain of youth ;)
But why? Are elderly clients underserved in that area? Are they going to ditch their original care provider and all come here?
Old people in the USA are EXTREMELY wealthy in terms of healthcare purchasing power. All retired people have medicare. Many retired people have additional healthcare coverage from their former employers (doesn't exist anymore -- disappeared along with pensions -- but this benefit used to be common). Many retired people have significant savings in addition to medicare and private health insurance.
Most new parents have little to no government assistance, do not have significant expendable income, and have little to no accumulated wealth. Children, of course, are even poorer than their deadbeat parents.
Or by cutting the cost.
