I often wonder if people who make these kinds of statements simply don't know how market forces work, or if they know how market forces work but just choose to pretend they don't exist in certain contexts where that reality feels particularly unfair...
Demand suppression doesn't work. "Having money doesn't make your illness more important" sounds like a noble sentiment, but by applying it in the real world you'd actually be reducing the total size of the pool of resources available to treat everyone. Talk about holier than thou...
Of course I know how market forces work. They are not the only forces we can manage. They are not the only levers we can pull. Economics are cool, but not almighty. There is no scenario in which a hospital gets extra profit, and turns around and simply reduces the cost for those in need. No - no additional resources are being removed. That's not how hospitals work.
You claim to know, yet you still make statements that are obviously foolish given said knowledge? Imagine applying this logic to other industries:
> The existence of folding phones inundates phone manufactures with orders for devices with unimportant luxury features when there are people who are struggling to afford even a basic entry level phone. Having money doesn't make your needs more important. We should ban folding phones to make entry-level phones more accessible to poor people.
Do you agree the paragraph above is unreasonable and that trying to implement it in the real world would make things worse for everyone? If so, why did you just propose the same thing for medical care a couple comments back?
That's what I'm so curious about; I see this all the time where when the subject matter is emotionally or politically charged people revert to this "there's a fixed-sized pie and I want to make sure I get a big piece" economic model, even while appearing in other contexts to understand that that's not how things work.
Demand suppression doesn't work. "Having money doesn't make your illness more important" sounds like a noble sentiment, but by applying it in the real world you'd actually be reducing the total size of the pool of resources available to treat everyone. Talk about holier than thou...