When corporations have become powerful monopolies (or regional monopolies) that trample on individual rights and captured regulators, should the citizens still respect the procedural correctness to its literal meaning? Or should we acknowledge that we have a flawed constitution, because while it checks the power of the government, the U.S. visionaries did not foresee the emergence of multinational corporations, structured in highly authoritarian ways, being able to influence public policy to great extent?
I believe we can agree that public goods are typically not as efficient as a _competitive_ private provider. But what if the market is not competitive at all? When ISPs/health insurers/hospital conglomerates essentially monopolizes different regions of the country, should the government step up and provide community broadband, single payer insurance or single provider healthcare? Or should we expect the government somehow being able to restore market competitiveness?
This is an open and shut issue if the only thing you're worried about is the end consumer. The gov't, on the other hand, needs to worry about the system including the insurance companies. Changing the rules so that a person can forgo health insurance until they are sick is a sure fire way to start a death spiral.
It wasn't until the law was changed to include the individual mandate was the pre-existing condition clause even viable. I'd argue the individual mandate is so weak, that we might end up with a death spiral anyways.
What's the popular saying on HN? "Don't tear down the fence until you know why it was put up in the first place."
Until we fix the collusion between the American Hospital Association[0] and insurance companies through the National Uniform Billing Committee[1] to opaquely set pricing, there will be no free market in the healthcare industry.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Hospital_Association
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Uniform_Billing_Commi...
Further, while the technology has advanced (eg cancer treatment for your dog), prices are much lower than what humans pay, and in some cases, declining.
Namely: - Inelasticity: economic terms, human healthcare is extremely inelastic, you'll spend everything you have to save your own life. Not so much with a pet. - Poor information: Because of so many middlemen, there is very little information for human healthcare, you rarely know how much something will cost before you owe it. - Non-Fungible: doctors are not a commodity that you can trade out like cereal. There are human relationships involved, that make it difficult to compare apples to apples.
These are all factors that human healthcare lacks that are generally necessary to make for an efficient market.
Every single sentence you wrote here is extremely ignorant of the political reality in which that usual proper process has been in the muck for years. You're not realizing the effect that gerrymandering, voter suppression, and money in politics has on the ability of the usual system to work to reflect the desires of people, and that redirecting people to traverse that maze is essentially sending them on a quest to square a circle that will effectively keep the status quo.
And the status quo isn't good enough. Remember, just a few years ago, someone would be denied healthcare due to pre-existing conditions and die. THAT was the status quo, and it was so toxic that the party in power now, controlling all parts of the three branches could not repeal it. Forced arbitration is similar to healthcare, most people don't realize how bad it is until they have to go to head with it.