I strongly support your line of thinking, but there's a number of issues with this viewpoint that I've identified, and I'm not entirely sure how to solve.
The main one is, the (expected) medical costs are different for different populations. In particular, the expensive sub-populations are (1) the elderly (because aging & death), (2) women (because pregnancy) and (3) some children (born with genetic diseases, birth deficiencies etc. but having no income/wealth to pay for them).
If we argue that medicine should be driven by the free markets, we should also allow the free market to take over other things, but we as a society (currently) refuse to do that (IMO for good reasons).
What's the value of old age? Retirees are almost completely non-productive, a drain on the society... you could argue about saving for retirement (it's "free market") but that's a bit of a lie, you can't "save" labour or energy, so there's always a transfer of value from the working population to the non-working population, and as the non-working retired population increases and the working population shrinks, that's going to become a problem one way or another (both in socialized and in individualistic retirement systems). Old age awaits everyone, a populace would probably be feeling very uncomfortable about their own future if they saw poor old people dying on the streets, refused medical care.
What's the value of bearing children? It's kind of parallel to the above, children are an investment into the future (future workers), currently it's on the individual to pay for this investment (pregnancy, career income loss, more housing, education costs) but the society benefits (extracting taxes / parts of the value produced by this future worker). Should women also bear the cost of medical care? You could say there's always a father in the picture, but some people also claim that fathers should have the option of financial abortion (given that they have no say in physical abortion). Generally I argue that there should be incentives for people to have kids (correlated with their income, so that high-income, usually highly educated people, have more of an incentive to have kids - e.g. some kind of negative tax rate).
And finally, what's the value of a human life? Should we condemn a kid to a short life full of suffering just because s/he was born with some mistake in their body? I mean, resources are limited so we always have to make trade-offs, but refusing medical care to kids born to poor parents seems particularly evil.
I'm not sure what the solution is... personally, I'm leaning towards a "highest highs, highest lows" kind of a society - having some kind of social net (regarding medicine, jobs, ...) while also allowing private markets for those who can afford them (i.e. if you want to buy private surgery, you can, if you're wealthy enough). But this needs to be carefully managed so the whole system kind-of works.
The main one is, the (expected) medical costs are different for different populations. In particular, the expensive sub-populations are (1) the elderly (because aging & death), (2) women (because pregnancy) and (3) some children (born with genetic diseases, birth deficiencies etc. but having no income/wealth to pay for them).
If we argue that medicine should be driven by the free markets, we should also allow the free market to take over other things, but we as a society (currently) refuse to do that (IMO for good reasons).
What's the value of old age? Retirees are almost completely non-productive, a drain on the society... you could argue about saving for retirement (it's "free market") but that's a bit of a lie, you can't "save" labour or energy, so there's always a transfer of value from the working population to the non-working population, and as the non-working retired population increases and the working population shrinks, that's going to become a problem one way or another (both in socialized and in individualistic retirement systems). Old age awaits everyone, a populace would probably be feeling very uncomfortable about their own future if they saw poor old people dying on the streets, refused medical care.
What's the value of bearing children? It's kind of parallel to the above, children are an investment into the future (future workers), currently it's on the individual to pay for this investment (pregnancy, career income loss, more housing, education costs) but the society benefits (extracting taxes / parts of the value produced by this future worker). Should women also bear the cost of medical care? You could say there's always a father in the picture, but some people also claim that fathers should have the option of financial abortion (given that they have no say in physical abortion). Generally I argue that there should be incentives for people to have kids (correlated with their income, so that high-income, usually highly educated people, have more of an incentive to have kids - e.g. some kind of negative tax rate).
And finally, what's the value of a human life? Should we condemn a kid to a short life full of suffering just because s/he was born with some mistake in their body? I mean, resources are limited so we always have to make trade-offs, but refusing medical care to kids born to poor parents seems particularly evil.
I'm not sure what the solution is... personally, I'm leaning towards a "highest highs, highest lows" kind of a society - having some kind of social net (regarding medicine, jobs, ...) while also allowing private markets for those who can afford them (i.e. if you want to buy private surgery, you can, if you're wealthy enough). But this needs to be carefully managed so the whole system kind-of works.