Some studies suggest that a single-payer system (thus socialized) is more cost-effective than the current free market in the USA: https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo....

Also, social benefits like protection against medical bankruptcy, universal coverage, and others are known to have a net positive impact.

The current medical system in the US is not remotely free market.

I'm not sure there's an advanced "free market" bealthcare system in the world we can use to even make that comparison.

The free market produces goods and services at less cost for everything else, why would health care be any different?

Because healthcare as a service does not come even close to satisfy the conditions required for perfect competition.

Without going too much in detail, the "customers" cannot have perfect information regarding the treatment or course of action that's most convenient for them at a given moment, and they cannot freely decide when (or often whether) to make use of the service or not—"It's probably best I get appendicitis now that I can afford it rather than wait until next year".

The free market does not require perfect competition nor perfect information at all. Imperfect information, for example, is called "risk", and risk is factored into every price.

Besides, why would you think socialist medicine would provide perfect information?

> Besides, why would you think socialist medicine would provide perfect information?

Where have I come even close to suggesting it would? Perfect information, to the extent it can be possible, is a requirement for a market to be efficient. What you call "socialist medicine" is by definition not a market, so perfect information is a moot point.

What universal healthcare can provide is the adequate incentives for providing early diagnosis, promoting preventative medicine, and giving safe and effective treatment. Where are the incentives for early diagnosis and prevention in free market healthcare?

Furthermore, pure free market healthcare provides an intrinsic incentive to extract abusive profit from a customer whose life or wellbeing are on the line, and who does not have the knowledge to decide whether they really need this expensive procedure they are being offered. This already happens to an extent under the current U.S. model. There's no reason to assume it wouldn't be even worse under a completely free market.

> Perfect information, to the extent it can be possible, is a requirement for a market to be efficient

This is simply not true, as I said, risk factors into every price.

> Where are the incentives for early diagnosis and prevention in free market healthcare?

Don't you feel any incentive to take care of yourself with early diagnosis and prevention?

> pure free market healthcare provides an intrinsic incentive to extract abusive profit from a customer whose life or wellbeing are on the line

Just like if you're hungry. But food in a free market is cheap and plentiful.

> who does not have the knowledge to decide whether they really need this expensive procedure they are being offered.

The beauty of the free market is the consumer gets to decide who to trust.

> There's no reason to assume it wouldn't be even worse under a completely free market.

The US had a free market in health care up to the 1960s, and there's no evidence of the dark predictions you make for it.

The unregulated free market mostly produces goods and services at less cost for the producer, which huge external costs to everything else.

Do you have a proof for such a statement? AFAIK most of negative externalities are either negligible or easy to be sued for. Or a responsibility of informed customer.

Of course, there's that ultimate hammer of greenhouse gases everybody is using daily, but besides these it is hard to confirm this. And these have also many positive externalities (access to plastics, cheap energy) that cannot be ignored, otherwise we would live in carbon-zero economy already.

Really? Why then are communist countries the most polluted?

Do you actually have anything to say, or are you just going to avoid having to form coherent arguments by saying “what about communism” to anyone who replies to you.

If the claim is "huge external costs", since those are not quantified, then it's fair to ask "compared to what".

So I compared it to communism.

If you have something else to compare it to, feel free.

It's not an either-or situation. In the UK we have a socialised health care system with a private health care system available to those that want it. I guess it's a question of how much you care about the plight of people at the bottom of society and how much you see it as a sort of civic duty to increase their access to high quality health care regardless of their life outcomes (low income).

I'm lucky that I don't rely on our national health service for everything but I still gladly pay towards it's running so others can use it. Of all the things the government taxes me for directly or indirectly payments towards the national health care service ranks very low on the list of annoyances.

Free health care is very, very expensive.

So? Governments spend obscene amounts of money on all sorts of things, it's just a case of placing it in your list of priorities.

Because health is quite literally priceless.

So is food. But every country that tried socialist food production reaped famine.

Yes, but food isn't magic and medicine to most people is.

Here take this pill and boom life extension is on a different level than this is my carrot and even though I have 100's you can't have any.

The first will lead to bankruptcy the second to riots.

> Yes, but food isn't magic and medicine to most people is.

The most bizarre argument I've encountered yet.

Maybe because often when you need it you can't take the time to shop around like you can with TV and cars.

Very little of health care is delivered through a trip to the emergency room.

Research suggest that nearly half is delivered by emergency departments. So even if it was half of that, your statement would still be an outright lie. What is your source that it is very little?

That does not seem to match up with current reality. At least not if the US is to be the example for free market health care. Looking at the stats it is by far the most expensive compared with pretty much any socialized health care in the world (and with worse outcomes): https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-vs-health...

The US medical system is not remotely free market. Obamacare, for example.

How would you know? We have examples of good socialised health care and terrible everything else.

Health care expenses tracked inflation until the late 1960s, when it started dramatically outpacing inflation. The 1960s saw a massive influx of the government into health care. The pace of medical cost increases hasn't slowed down since. Every new government intervention makes it worse.

Proof?

The American health care system before the 1960s. And also:

"How American Health Care Killed My Father"

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/09/how-ame...

compares the free market section of the health care system with the rest of it.

OK, but... the 1960s were literally 60 years ago. The world looks very different, and so does healthcare. Is it really comparable?

Is economics different from the 1960s?

I was alluding to the progress in medical tech, and the corresponding rise in the cost of specialised medical equipment. While we developed fancy tools like accurate MRI machines that let us treat patients better, they also cost more to buy. My intuition tells me that in the 1960s, treating people was cheaper because we just didn't have any machinery to spend more money on.

Read the article, where Lasik surgery got cheaper and cheaper while MRIs got more and more expensive.