When free market doesn't work, free market advocates have their solution : there wasn't enough free market, so we need MORE free market.

A free market wouldn’t be dumb enough to give a teenager a loan for 100k. That idiocy is reserved for the government.

Hence the free market would have excluded any teenager who doesn't have rich parents from higher education. Hardly a good thing.

Free market brings prices down and quality up. The government tried to ‘help’ 50 years ago and now the prices have become so distorted that without government help you would need to be rich to go to school.

People like you think the government should solve a problem that they themselves created.

> Free market brings prices down and quality up

In theory, but in practice there are many markets where that simply doesn't work, mostly due to natural monopolies, such as any type of infrastructure, healthcare or education, where competition is impractical or impossible, equal access for everyone is extremely important, and costs are high.

I think free market could work with education. It is really a question how to verify the results. That is how should degrees be granted. Which is rather complicated issue as there is way too many ways to cheat.

Still, nothing really stops competing methods and prices for teaching to competing levels.

Our mostly private health care system is twice as expensive as the social systems in other developed countries because the government got involved?

By what fraction will the new set of tweaks have to shrink costs to pay for the last 30 years of the private health care market's failure to deliver on its "more efficient" promise? Remember, it has to cut them by 50% just to break even, and it'll have to go further to make this experiment worthwhile. A lot further.

Spoiler alert: it won't even get to 50%. It won't even get close to 50%.

There already is a massive public healthcare system in America called Medicare and Medicaid which is the root of distorted prices. The lack of price transparency adds fuel to the fire and allows those prices to stay high without any upfront awareness given to the end consumer.

A lack of price transparency is indeed deplorable, but it isn't the root of the problem. The root of the problem is that demand for emergency treatment is inelastic. Inelastic demand curves result in wildly volatile prices. And when the service is a basic human need rather than a luxury, to prioritize a free market solution is to prioritize the market over the human. Markets must operate for the good of people, not the other way around.

Price transparency is shifting deck chairs on the titanic. I actually do think the new chair arrangement is a notable improvement on the old one -- but in an industry with unaddressed tectonic issues, it's not going to right the ship.

I might be wrong. Maybe price transparency will lead to a 50% reduction in prices in the next few years. I doubt it, though.

When I got my tonsils removed my options were the $75k surgery at the private hospital, or waiting 3 months at the public hospital. I actually stopped consulting and took a job so that I could get insurance, and had the surgery two weeks later.

A few years back I broke my wrist while bicycling across England. I was patched up and casted a few hours later, I think the bill was about $200, as a foreign tourist. It wasn't even enough to cover my travel insurance deductible. This would have cost me about $5k in the USA.

I agree that the free market works fine, for those who run the market.

The free market didn’t make your operation 75k. The government giving a blank check to hospitals and the lack of price transparency did that. Both are as far from the ‘free market’ as you can get.

Sure, whatever. Shit doesn't happen in socialized countries. The only libertarian countries that ever exist are that short vacuum of power when a banana republic dictator fails and the new warlords haven't chosen a new dictator. But yeah, sure, can't criticize something that doesn't exist. Good argument strategy.

Weren’t your tonsils a pre-existing condition? How did the new insurance cover it?

I lied to my doctor to an extent, and he lied to the insurance company to an extent.

All you have to do is ask a doctor "Please don't put any of this in a file until I have insurance next week". It doesn't mean anything to him to add the dates later. It's in his best interest, otherwise he won't get the cheddar.