He will as soon as he reads the first paragraph of the Wiki article found upon entering “market failure” into a Google search.
My whole point was that Fear Itself cited health insurance as an example of how the free market fails. I took issue with this, since there is very little “free” involved in this heavily regulated industry and there are hundreds of examples of much freer industries where the free market does work for the benefit of everybody.
So why don’t you talk about real market failures and government failures (you do know what government failure is, right?) instead of defending incorrect arguments that health insurance is an example of a free market?
No. It is not the reason insurance exists based on the very definition of “insurance.” For example, one of the most important tools that insurers have is risk appraising. If insurers are prevented from “cherry-picking the lowest-risk customers” by law, then you cannot claim that your high rate is due to the free market (and I cited many other examples of distortions). It appears that you want to redefine the whole purpose of “insurance” because you claim to be a concerned citizen. This is fine and obviously lawmakers who created all the laws affecting health insurers shared your concerns and you successfully created the system that we have today. Congrats.
However, it does add up to my statement that simplistic government solutions can create unintended consequences, which many well-intentioned statists completely fail to grasp.
Hey, erez, is there a choice other than “statist” and “just like erez”? Does it have a nifty label?
**emphasis added
Are you asserting that Rand Paul is lying to the American people in order to get elected? Or are you just attributing to him positions that he doesn’t hold but you would sure like him to?
That’s silly, the assertion isn’t that he’s lying to the people of America in order to get elected.
It’s that he’s lying to the people of Kentucky in order to get elected.
Touche!
Nice straw man. I was talking about health care insurance, not “health care system.” In the very post you quoted:
Your post is really laughable, since you apparently think that the recently signed health care reform bill will hurt insurance companies’ profits. Hint: the market disagrees.
Maybe if you want to analyze free market failures you should try choosing from one of the hundreds of examples of at least nominally free market industries instead of choosing one of the most heavily regulated industries? Crying when getting called on the fact that you choose a biased sample won’t help. I’m also sure that you will be analyzing government failures in the same thorough fashion.
Ahh, yet another personal attack and not a hint of a cogent argument. I lucked out today!
I didn’t say a word about health care. It doesn’t matter, since libertarians say the same thing about everything; the problem is always too much regulation. Never too little.
I’m not claiming that government is the solution to all problems.
If your dislike of conversational shortcuts presents a large obstacle to your participation in this thread, I will be sure to avoid such nifty labels, even if they do pretty accurately describe the positions of many people in this thread.
Then I have a question specifically for you, Der Trihs: ignoring things like free-speech abuses, would you say that Venezuelan President Chavez’s economic policies are taking that country in the right direction? Do you think he is going too far or not far enough? Do you think that his policies will improve or worsen Venezuelan economy in the long run?
Since I haven’t been paying much attention to him I have no idea.
OK, thank you for the answer. If you decide to read more about his economic policies (they are pretty widely covered by the U.S. media), I will be interested in your input. I welcome answers from others as well.
Sounds like a good topic for a new thread. Why don’t you start one?
You are misunderstanding his post. He’s not saying that too much govt regulation is never a problem, he’s saying that when Libertarians look at a problem they always assume it is because of too much regulation, and never consider that it may be the opposite. It’s a True Scotsmen situation.
I don’t like Libertarians *or * Chavez because they are both ideologues.
Start with a certain level of regulation. Remove some regulation. Situation worsens. Clearly the answer is we didn’t deregulate enough!
No, it was a serious question.
In your posts, you only ever describe people as 1 of 2 things: they are either “libertarian” or “statist”.
Are there any classifications in between the two, or are those our only options?
Okay, apparently you don’t in fact understand the technical-term sense of “market failure”. Brief explanation:
“Market failure” isn’t just a general expression meaning loosely “any situation in which a market did not happen to work well”. It’s an economics concept implying, to get technical, that there’s a Pareto sub-optimal allocation of resources, and consequently that the normal operation of market mechanisms doesn’t result in economic efficiency.
There are specific types of situations that are designated as “market failures”, because they violate the required conditions for the efficient operation of free markets. The one that I mentioned in a previous post as affecting healthcare markets is positive externalities, meaning that some positive effect(s) of a good are too widely dispersed beyond the individual consumer for the producer to be able to successfully charge the consumer for them. For instance, the improved public health and financial stability resulting from universal health insurance coverage are very positive effects for society as a whole, but individual consumers don’t perceive them as individual benefits that they should pay for in their individual premiums.
In short, you’ve interpreted my argument exactly backwards. I’m not arguing that health insurance is an example of a free market. My point is that because of the existence of this and other market failures in the healthcare industry, health insurance is NOT in fact an example of a free market, and intrinsically CAN’T WORK as a free market. Not if its ultimate purpose is to serve the social goals that I mentioned above.
What does that have to do with the reason that insurance exists in the first place? Insurance, from the citizen’s point of view, exists to fulfill a social goal: namely, to make health care more accessible and affordable by spreading its costs throughout a broader risk pool. Whether or not insurers are allowed by the government to cherry-pick customers via risk appraisal is irrelevant to the more fundamental question of why insurance exists at all, which is what I thought we were discussing until you went off on a tangent.
Dayum, Kimstu. You must have read like, a really big economics book, with like, a really big highlighter and everything!