People get elective dental procedures all the time (braces) that are highly affordable and conveniently delivered, without getting pushed into bankruptcy.

1) How much money goes into pet medicine research vs human?

2) What happens when a pet is sick and the cost of care exceeds money of owner?

You want a health care system where you use 15-20 year old medicine with no research, and most bills > $1000 lead to euthanasia? Sure that would be a cheap healthcare system...

What? Animal health is a huge industry. Zoetis was spun off of Pfizer and is making money hand over fist. Lots of new animal drugs are approved each year.

> You want a health care system where you use 15-20 year old medicine with no research, and most bills > $1000 lead to euthanasia? Sure that would be a cheap healthcare system...

15-20 year technology (and I hope you agree modern medicine is, broadly speaking, a form of technology) is not old; it is robust and time tested. Today, building business critical operations in Fortune 500 companies on top of Linux is a no brainer, but not so much in 1996; and whoever told you otherwise back then was both unprofessional and self-deluded with evangelist zeal.

Your claim that veterinarian medicine has "no research" does not hold water either. Sure, there might be less money being expended in researching animal health care than human health care, but this does not mean that the science behind veterinarian medicine is any less valid. If anything, it's probably more valid because there are so many less emotional hot-button issues and underhanded political agendas lurking around it.

About the $1k bills, there are two ways to see it. You claim that it is a bad thing that most >$1K procedures end up with pacient death. I, on the other hand, would like to point out that this is a proof that it is possible for a whole calss of modern health care professionals to charge <$1k for procedures that solve most non life-threatening conditions and remain gainfully in business. Note this argument is valid regradless of your position on human euthanasia.

Finally, your use of "cheap" healthcare system is used as a double-entendre. You are conflating "affordable" with "stingy" in that single word. As exposed above, you can clearly see that the first not necessarily implies the second.

You're right - on the literal level. BUT parent said: "It is just one other indicator of the flaws of the free market approach to everything in the US" - and if their statement is interpreted as implying - "the flaws in what's called the free market approach" then the rest of their statement stands.

The health care system is a good example of the profit-driven, marketized-through-regulation, financial-speculation driven system.

And the thing is that no amount of praise of the literal free market is going to change these market-regulated-industry-fusions into free market. I mean, it's a standard approach for functionaries to praise the free market then jump to whatever gawd-awful financialization serves those functionaries' backers.

I mean, "just let them die" is usually an option for seriously ill pets. Generally society frowns on this fashion of treating humans. So "everyone" agrees some compromise is necessary in human health care - but naturally one then wakes to find the latest compromise is a cleverly constructed worst-of-all-possible-world except for X many large interests (education, healthcare, prisons etc).

On the other side, check the software business. It's a powerful engine for growth and wealth in this country, despite having driven prices for software literally to zero. And the software business in the US is the most free market industry in the country - no licenses, permits, subsidies, tariffs, regulations, etc.

EG: in a free market, if someone has a healthcare emergency, yet cannot afford to pay for the service required, the free market would say -- dump this person in the street. Not exactly a morally pleasing choice. Free markets assume a rational and informed consumer; a person having a medical emergency is not always going to be a rational and informed consumer.

Not to say there is plenty of scope for a competitive marketplace in healthcare (there is, particularly for less critical care and wellness etc.), but certain portions really don't fall in scope in my opinion.

The problem with the US healthcare market is that it kind of pretends to be this "free market healthcare" system, while in reality being a half-baked socialized medical system built in bits and pieces over time. Some people are covered by the government (Medicare and Medicaid). The government relies on companies to provide much of the remainder (with tax incentives), but heavily regulates the type of health care that can be offered (eg HMOs). Since not everyone is employed by a large company, this leaves many gaps where people have no de facto health coverage at all. Except for emergency rooms, which (thanks to some notorious emergency street dumping instances in the 1980s) will accept anyone these days.

It's a mess. "Obamacare" merely plugged a couple of gaps. Much greater reform is needed, IMHO.

But there does seem to be a chorus of people who, with their strong belief in free markets, believe that the US healthcare system is a free market one (it's not) and consequently believe that the US healthcare system is the best in the world (anyone who has traveled knows how laughable this statement is). It's hard to get meaningful reform as long as this belief persists.

So before the EMTALA was passed in 1986 people were dying in the street? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Medical_Treatment_an...

(In practice: some private hospitals refused to accept poor uninsured patients, so these patients would be shuffled around in an attempt to find a hospital that would accept them. Sometimes patients would die before a hospital was found.)

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1346189/pdf/canm...

I understand one of the reasons EMTALA was passed was due to public outrage caused by reports within newspapers, 60 Minutes, etc. on patient dumping.

From what I can Google, there are still patient dumping cases raised, even though the EMTALA exists. (12 settlements in 2013 for instance: http://www.beckershospitalreview.com/legal-regulatory-issues...)

Healthcare is not a fungible good. If you have aggressive cancer you can't just switch to a phsychiatrist because he/she is a "cheaper good" than your oncologist. Delaying purchase of your heart surgery may mean death.

"Excuse me sir, I know I might be having a heart attack, but can you please provide me a quote for this ambulance ride? I'd like to do some due diligence." Said exactly no one.

Metcalfe's Law only kicks into high gear when everyone is capable of joining the same network. If there are three or four proprietary networks with limited and expensive communications between them, growth is hobbled.

Or, to take another tack, how much has access to clean water done for you? How much has access to a house that isn't burgled done for you?

Just because you personally never received a check doesn't mean the government hasn't given you benefit.

Why do you think other networks wouldn't have grown global?

> If there are three or four proprietary networks with limited and expensive communications between them, growth is hobbled.

I agree, and there was tremendous pressure to interconnect them. The "inter" part of internet is the result of that, it's why it's called the internet rather than Arpanet. Numerous packet switching networks were developed in the 1960s, not just Arpanet.

Because privately-run networks have to turn a profit by the end of the fiscal year, if not sooner. It's too easy for a company to engage in profit-seeking behavior which harms long-term growth, like demanding fees to interoperate with it. The core Internet protocol suite, OTOH, is completely specified by RFCs which are free to read and implement.

Local and federal governments need developers to write software and will use contractors, but that's not really a subsidy.

The NSF will occasionally fund research that may or may not use software. For example, I see that the Sage math software has a few grants listed:

http://www.sagemath.org/development-ack.html

I don't know that any of this really supports the grandparent's comment, though. McDonald's is closer to being government-subsidized than anything in the software industry.

Consider also that the DEC's 1967 TOPS-10 operating system led to RT-11 to CP/M to MS-DOS to NT to Windows 10. I'm not aware of government subsidy having any role in that.

I get saying that Windows was a better user environment (maybe) than what existed in UNIX at the time, though I was fine in FVWM.

But I don't think I can take someone seriously that thinks DOS is better than UNIX.

Also, Edison invented the vacuum tube upon which it is all based. I read a biography of him, and he never got a subsidy. Shouldn't he get all the credit?

Also I would call most of the government projects that Oracle is on subsidies considering how little value they deliver and how much they cost.

Selling to the government is not a subsidy.

There are probably many companies that make your point much better is all.

Or do you mean we don't need copyright protection, limited liability and bankruptcy protection allowing entrepreneurs to take risks, laws protecting investors and corporations, public education system, and so forth?

Why would Edison want all the credit? Newton said he only saw as far as he did by standing on the shoulders of giants. We are all inheriting the accumulated wealth and knowledge of all the people who came before us. Why not the people around immediately before us who built the society we live in?

> Why would Edison want all the credit?

Why indeed.

Existing in a country where a private company is a profit center as opposed to something for bandits to loot?

The lesson from this is not "free markets are bad," it's "simplistic ideologies are useless."

We know that private actors are bad at some things, like funding basic research and building roads and utilities. We also know that governments are bad at some things, like making consumer products. So let the government build the roads and let GE make the washing machines.

The worst alternative is to have the government do half of something. This is the US healthcare system. Single payer has problems, but it works. The complete absence of government in healthcare would have different problems but would also work. What we have doesn't work. It's a corrupt mechanism for funneling public money into drug companies.

Here's the test for whether the government should do something: Does it make sense for the government to pay for this and then give it away for absolutely no money whatsoever to every citizen of the country? If not, the government shouldn't do it. Notice that the answer for healthcare is then not obvious, but the thing we have is not a valid answer.

Cards on the table, I do think that more freedom in the market would be good for the entire system, from top to bottom. But I can find myself in total agreement with those who think it should be more socialized that what we have now is a really crazy, chaotic system that seems to manage to combine the worst of both worlds. As a result, it's every bit as valid to claim that socialized health care is a disaster because the US health care system proves that it doesn't work... which is to say, an entirely invalid and fallacious claim.

Now I live in a country that buries its youth in debt that can't be discharged through bankruptcy, to pay for an increasingly ineffective education, to get a job almost anyone could do, that lists higher education as a requirement when it really doesn't have to.

If you zoom out to the big picture, it's almost as if employment in the US is becoming a pay-to-play system.

You need to screen for at least a two year degree to get employees who are functionally literate for both reading and writing of moderate complexity.

There's a real steep capability slope in terms of education and information worker qualification. Most high school graduates or GED folks without specific education lack a good broad understanding AND lack vocational training. A previous employer had a specific mentorship program that had really good results with at-risk youth, but that required substantial investments in time and $.

Pay-to-play, spending money to make money, has usually been the rule even if you're born rich. The trick is always on how to spend less money than other people at your level to make the same or more -- your required piece of paper, while still more expensive than it used to be, isn't unavoidably crippling-debt expensive, and so with a little forethought you can get in the game with a lot less expense than some of your peers.

If basic income can somehow work economically we might turn into a free-to-play system, I don't know if that would actually be better overall though.

> For your first bit, do you mean things like fathers paying some shop owner some money to give their sons a chance at a job over some other kids that went through a hiring process, or do you mean things (still going on) like politicians backing certain regulations that just so happen to mightily benefit the corporation they become a highly paid member of when they lose their reelection or retire?

I assume he's talking about neither of those, but rather the common practice of buying a job for yourself. For example, you might go to a highly-placed English functionary with a big bag of cash and purchase a post as customs inspector for a port somewhere in the Empire. Historically this was more the norm than the exception in colonial Europe.

(Fun fact: the customs inspector position was generally a lot more expensive than notionally better jobs like "governor" (also for sale). That's because the customs inspector was ideally placed to take bribes himself.)

One of the largest reasons for skyrocketing tuition is the US government's guaranteed student loans. And those loans are very difficult to discharge by declaring bankruptcy, which makes the loans less risky to the schools. This is the farthest thing from free market capitalism.

That said what passes for education at most places works best when you do start treating teachers and students as drones. The logical conclusion of that is something like Khan Academy with spaced repetition, and the savings in time and money worldwide would be tremendous if that system were to be embraced by the US department of education. What passes for education is definitely worthwhile for some things, but it's not really in the traditional spirit of education.

grade inflation exists because of this unwillingness to offend people and telling people they are not the best if offensive. hence why colleges like affirmative action is that they will get candidates not used to being at the top of their class and be more willing to accept lower grades (go look it up, it does exist and been studied)

the US health care system, well it only got into the condition it was in because of over regulation. preventing insurance from crossing state lines pretty much doomed it

Your doctor doesn't make any money when they prescribe something. They make money off the office visit. There was absolutely zero financial gain for the doc prescribing you antibiotics.

But, but, (sputters), but the Patriotic American Baby Jesus loves Freedom Markets™.