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He then mentioned that we already have some socialized services in the USA, which people have no problem with. He used the example of fire departments, which provide service to everyone and are not expected to turn a profit. He argued that if fire departments were forced to maximize revenues for shareholders, it would be a terrible idea that might compromise safety in life-or-death situations. Since healthcare is also often a life-or death issue, a socialized approach, where profit concerns are removed from the equation, is the best answer.
This seemed like a reasonable argument to me. Am I wrong for thinking this?
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I do think you are wrong for thinking this. For one thing, I think it is wrong to assume that having a profit mechanism will make things worse or inefficient; if anything, the opposite is true. Without a price structure (which would at least
allow for profits, though not at the exclusion of charity), there is no real way of efficiently allocating resources (Mises argues this point well in
Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth).
But beyond this point, I think part of the problem is that the desire for 'socialized' medicine is present mostly because our system is so horrible. So a proponent of socilized medicine asks: what system is better, our current one or a socilized one (like Sweden?). And honestly, I'm not sure that a socialized system
wouldn't be better than what we have. But, whether it gets explicitly stated or not, our current system somehow ends up getting labeled as a free market system, and then it becomes a battle of 'profits vs nonprofits' and 'capitalist vs socialist', and we more and more want the latter because the former is working so poorly. But we
don't have a free market system, and the problem with our system has nothing to do with profits (if it did, why wouldn't our 'shoe-providing system' suffer similarly?). The problem is one of corporatism, of government regulations (regulations that benefit the large medical corps at the expense of the poor), of licensing and rampant monopolization.
So I am skeptical of the degree to which socializing healthcare can fix the system--I think it
may (depedning on the specifics) switch which problems are biggest (socialist systems may be much less detrimental to the poor, but often at the expense of both efficiency and expediency, as well the obvious loss of freedom).
Luckily I think that completely voluntary solutions can solve both problems--and in fact they
have, historically. We had a very functional and reasonable system in this country until
government "fixed" it.