Sounds like an indictment of the present system.
Those factors increase the cost in any system. They still apply even when the feds are paying, except perhaps if you don't let anyone else pay, and if the feds greatly restrict what they will cover and how much they will pay for it.
But if you do that your causing other problems.
We use money or, if you are lucky, a good employer Which is more fair?
Allowing people to pay for their own care, or their own insurance (either through writing a check, or as part of their compensation for their services) is more fair than forcing them in to a lottery or making them wait months or years for treatment.
And BTW, in many countries health care isn't a "scarce good".
Health care is and always has been (for as long as there has been such a thing as health care) a scarce good.
"In economics, scarcity is defined as the condition of human wants and needs exceeding production possibilities. In other words, society does not have sufficient productive resources to fulfill those wants and needs. Alternatively, scarcity implies that not all of society's goals can be fully attained at the same time, so that trade-offs are made of one good against others."
en.wikipedia.org
Air might not be a scarce good (at least not in most situations), but water (at least drinkable water) is. Oil is a scarce good, and not just because production hasn't kept pace with demand recently. Milk, beef, coal, wood, iron, basically anything you or anyone else might pay for is a scarce good.
Scarce does not in this context mean rare, hard to find, or available only in small quantities. Scarce means that you can't meet all possible demand, at least not without giving up the ability to meet some other demand.
If something isn't a scare good it means you don't have to consider economic trade offs at all when you want to get some of it. And not just because the government or some rich uncle is paying (because they have to consider economic trade offs), but because it is essentially a zero cost item. |
