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A Question for Single Payer Advocates:

Are you against monopolies? I suspect the answer is yes. You're clearly a fiscal liberal. Monopolies are bad. Prices are too high, quality of output and innovation suffers, etc. Then why do you support monopoly in the health care industry? How is it any different from monopoly in telcom, in oil, in air travel?

Awaiting your responses.

Comments

Steven H. Newton said…
Mat
Think about it this way: we just discovered that the bureaucrats who run Homeland Security didn't actually keep real case files on the Gitmo detainees. We have a country that accepted the idea that the way to fight a flexible tactical organization like Al Qaeda was to build the largest bureaucracy ever housed under the American government, staff--by the way--with lots of outcasts from other departments.

This is exactly the recipe that liberals believe will bring the country effective health care.
January 26, 2009 at 9:08 PM
Anonymous said…
Don't you know monopolies are an inevitable outcome of libertarian capitalism? We should be asking you this question.
January 26, 2009 at 9:21 PM
Anonymous said…
Bob:

I'm not against monopolies. Not natural monopolies, at least. I am, however, against government mandated monopoly. I'm against the government prohibiting business that it doesn't control. I'm against creating monopolies where they wouldn't have come into existence on their own. Because they wouldn't have.
January 26, 2009 at 9:41 PM
Brian Miller said…
monopolies are an inevitable outcome of libertarian capitalism

Not really. In libertarian capitalism, government creations such as corporations, patents, trademarks, restrictive regulations, etc. wouldn't exist.

It's those government-created tools that allow monopolies to form and thrive. In fact, no monopoly in history has ever emerged without being closely allied with, and protected by, government.

PS -- one of the funniest things I hear from the left in defense of regulations is "without government, who would protect us from corporate predation?!?!" Without government, there would be NO CORPORATIONS, which are themselves a creation of the state that endow certain people with special rights -- such as the right not to be sued personally for activities undertaken as a corporation -- in exchange for payments made to the state!
January 27, 2009 at 9:57 AM
Delaware Watch said…
Your question rests on a faulty premise. No one for single-payer universal health care says that private health insurance should be outlawed and should not exist. They say that government should provide health insurance to everyone as a right.

Just because Social security exists doesn't mean that IRA's and annuities are illegal and don't exist.
January 27, 2009 at 10:27 AM
Anonymous said…
Dana:

Then I'm apparently missing the meaning of single payer. I was always under the impression that the government was THE single payer in question.
January 27, 2009 at 2:53 PM
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