Imagine a Patient in a Nursing Home

I realize my recent post was confusing. I think I can clarify it with an example.

Imagine a patient in a nursing home. This patient would receive relatively little benefit from ordering a CORVID19 test. A negative test would not protect the patient from the disease as the patient is likely to catch the disease from the facility. A positive test might adversely affect the patient.

In contrast, the nursing home would receive a great benefit by having a system that tests patients for infectious diseases.

To be frank, such a system wouldn't simply test people. A good testing system would test the entire environment. For example, a good system would routinely test air filters and might even test the effluent in sewer pipes to monitor pathogens in the facility.

This example highlights a major point about testing. In this case, the individual receives relatively little benefit from the test. The nursing home (which sells health care to the public at a sizeable profit) benefits tremendously for the test.

I contend that a properly functioning market based system would recognize and resolve the issue. The facility (the beneficiary of the test) should be the payer.

Now, lets imagine an employer: Individual employees receive relatively little benefit from the test. An employer would receive sizeable benefit by testing both its employees and its facility for any pathogens.

In a properly functioning market, the entity that receives the benefits pays the cost.

Let's imagine a third scenario. Imagine a restaurant with poor hygiene and a horrific health record. The restaurant owner demands that sick cooks and waiters come to work. They sneeze on the food and infect others despite the fact that this is extremely poor practice. A functioning market system with a functioning legal system sues and shuts down bad operations. Marginal operations see the risks and adjust service. Look at the large number of places that voluntarily shut down this week. There was no need for the state to impose force. People saw the risk and responded accordingly.

The United States does not have a properly functioning health care market. We have a health care system built to the desires of politicians and insurance companies. The political system broke our health care system. As we watch the pandemic unfold, I think people should take the time to discuss the different ways that different systems respond to the pandemic.

Anyway, Bernie Sanders has been using the current health care crisis to push socialism. He starts with the half truth that it is absurd to expect individuals to pay for the CORVID19 tests. The claim is half true because individuals receive relatively little benefit from random testing. It is mostly false because the entities that benefit the most from the tests would bear the costs for the test.

I wish to repeat. If I were in charge of testing; I wouldn't just be testing people, I would test whole environments. (I suspect that this is being done).A properly functioning market economy wouldn't be charging individuals for systems testing. It would charge the system. The system resells the testing as part of the products that the system provides and would actually do a better job than socialism which tries to justify the deaths of thousands with quaint notions like "herd immunity."

The Bernie Sanders crowd is using the CORVID19 crisis to sell socialism. Socialists never let a crisis go to waste.

Every crisis must be used to raise the state and push individuals down.

A response to the last post accused me of killing people to promote free market ideas. So, I guess I should end by noting that the National Health System responded to CORVID19 by employing an grand socialist ideal called herd immunity.

The socialist ideal of herd immunity starts with the supposition that the health of the herd is more important than the health of the individual. The highly vaunted socialized system in Britain plans for CORVID was to let the disease flare out. The lauded NHS would let CORVID19 cull the elderly with the idea that culling the herd would improve herd immunity.

If we want to play the foolish game of claiming that people who discuss ideas kill; well, I have news for for the fans of Bernie, Madura, Lenin and Castro. Collectivists have far more blood on their hands than free marketeers.