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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: geode00 who wrote (263082)	4/29/2008 8:01:04 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 281500

With nationalized health care, the cost of health care can be reduced on a per capita basis A questionable assertion. A highly questionable assertion if you mean without lowering quality. Also an irrelevant assertion to the point you quoted right before making the statement. I am asking you how you are applying the idea of consumer surplus to the health care system. The surplus is the extent that we value the care we get more than the cost we pay for it. Saying we don't get what we pay for is in effect saying the consumer surplus is negative. You can try to argue its low, or that its not as good as it would be with a different medical care system, but it isn't negative. No, people don't need to know who the FDA is or who UL is or what either of them do. Government regulation is good enough, not perfect but good enough, that most people are quite comfortable going to a store and purchasing most products. Most consumers wouldn't need to know about them with out extensive regulation. Those that do would have an important effect at the margin, the lost sales from not having such approval would be a significant factor even if only a minority knows or cares about such approval. And the factor would get much bigger once a major issue arises. You might reply that you don't want to have to wait for a major issue, but such issues happen with our current system as well. In any case you wanted my initial/utopian idea, rather than dealing with the current entrenched realities. A private system would grow in effectiveness over time just as the public system has. To look at another areas consider OSHA, sure things have gotten safer since OSHA started regulating, but at pretty much the same rate that things where getting safer before OSHA. A fair response to that might be "well even if a private system, would have developed as well and as fast as the government system, we already have the government system, and it would take time for a private system to be effective, and in the meantime things might be more dangerous". That's a pretty decent argument and one of the reasons that when I look at the real world and consider the actual complexities based on what now exists, rather than trying for a utopian ideal, I don't recommend rapidly putting a hatchet to regulations, instead pruning and trimming, and controlling the growth of regulation, while perhaps chopping out the areas least in need of regulation, or the most foolish regulations in any area. What government agencies are you talking about that survive even if they are harmful or useless? Another bizarre question. I never said "government is useless, but it should stick around anyway". You would have companies kill consumers Customers die now as well. The main force keeping them from dieing is not government regulation, but the fact the killing customers is not good for business. And as I said above, I'm not about to take a battle ax to food safety regulations, so your "you would have companies kill consumers" statement is another non sequitur from you. Do you know which toothpaste was poisoned or which dog food was poisoned? The distributors and retailers get rid of such product as fast as they can discover it exists. They have more incentive than the FDA does to work hard on getting rid of it, they could lose customers or face lawsuits. The Chinese source companies also started to clean up their act because they could lose customers, the end consumer doesn't know who they are, but the end consumers aren't their customers. In any case once again, I haven't argued here for getting rid of regulations about food safety, so I have no idea why you keep attacking me for doing so. I have argued that people should be free to prescribe and use drugs without FDA approval. What his has to do with poison dog food is beyond me.