What if nobody had insurance? wrote:
DiscoGary wrote:That is exactly what free markets do.
I'll just repost this:
There might only be one treatment discovered for a particular type of cancer for example and just one company that spent billions of dollars and 20 years developing it. What happens then? Competing companies are supposed appear from nowhere, spend billions and 20 years developing another effective product then sell it for half the price of the original company to help out Average Joe? It's just unrealistic.
Gary, your arguments are exactly like that guy who was mocking this sort of approach earlier on in this thread. Just shout 'free market' at every problem and disregard all the details.
The only way to guarantee that a competitor will appear is to allow the original company to make billions of dollars in profit. Any attempt to force the company to lower it's profits to help out the Average Joe will stifle innovation. If a huge number of average Joe's are in need of the cure, then the price will eventually be driven down by competition. BUT.... the price will not be driven down if the government steps in and says "this drug costs so much that we need to subsidize it", so we're going to help all the people who can't afford it. Where's the incentive to lower the cost?
So right now our system is being set up to maintain the highest possible cost structure, which makes health care unaffordable and ensures that people will turn to the government to help them out.