Comments by "Doncarlo" (@doujinflip) on "The Legislation That Changed America Forever" video.

  1. Healthcare like other utilities is a natural monopoly due to the time sensitivity and huge information asymmetry between actors -- you're not going to shop around for the best ER rates in the middle of a heart attack, and you'd need to graduate medical school yourself to even start challenging the diagnosis and prescriptions of a doctor (even then it's not recommended). This is why the patient-facing side of healthcare is so easily broken when allowing the "free market" to dictate payments and treatments -- each provider effectively enjoys substantial monopoly powers themselves, and especially for-profit schemes come at the expense of the time of doctors and service quality of patients in the exam room. Resolving this seems to involve having a nonprofit accountable administrator (like a government, as much as you refuse to believe it to be one) strictly regulate if not control healthcare like it does every other utility. Top-end services that the rich enjoy might see a hit, but that's not what most patients require anyway. Being constantly abroad, I've benefitted from treatments in places where the whole population pays into the system -- even as a foreign tourist the higher "out of pocket" expense for me still ends up cheaper and services much better due to the collectivized costs of the underlying medical infrastructure.
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  2. That's how bad it was before the ACA for the rest of America who couldn't afford or were denied coverage.
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