POLITICAL ECONOMY IS HARD.

Look, it's probably not sporting to pick on Common Dreams contributors such as Jackson Diianni.  "Every other developed country guarantees healthcare to all citizens as a basic human right. We’re essentially the only ones that decided to turn our health into a commodity."

That basic right is only as good as your productive sector's ability to deliver on it.  Which isn't very good when people pretend medical services are not a commodity.

Nobody has an incentive to discover the price. "Buying medical services and buying textbooks have been regularly decried as gouge-fests." Yes, the article is old, and the third-party payment (or principal-agent) phenomenon is canonical, and yet our political masters continue to hoodwink the taxpayers into making stuff "affordable" without providing incentives to discover the prices, or something approximating to the frontier production function.

But when you turn an effeminate-looking "cultural criticism" type loose, you know full well that reality doesn't matter.

Historically, the costs of healthcare rise faster than wages and overall inflation. Employers often shift these costs onto workers in the form of higher premiums, co-pays, and deductibles or by dropping benefits for spouses, retirees, and part-time workers. The result is that people are being squeezed more and more. Nearly half of all Americans report struggling to afford healthcare.

It’s been demonstrated numerous times that universal healthcare would save money. Taxes would go up, but private health insurance premiums would be eliminated, so the average American would pay substantially less. It would just be in the form of a tax, not a premium. One report from 2020 compared 22 different cost analyses of potential single-payer initiatives at both the state and federal level and found that 19 of them projected savings (in the first year and long-term).

It’s essential that we transition to a system that prioritizes patient care over profit. Single-payer is the future of healthcare. Until the US joins the rest of the world in guaranteeing healthcare as a basic human right to all citizens, the costs will continue to balloon, as more and more Americans are needlessly bankrupted or killed.

Fine sounding words, and all wrong.  You can pretend that the single payer is lowering "costs," but perhaps that's because the single payer is stiffing the providers.  Those "costs" rising "faster than wages?"  Adjusted for quality, doesn't that make sense?

Some procedures are getting cheaper. The biggest winner is laser hair removal, with the price falling almost by half from 1998 to 2015. (Probably less painful than getting a bikini wax. Not that I have any experience with either procedure.) Botox injections, chemical peels, and eyelid surgeries are about 25 percent cheaper. Other cosmetic surgeries have increased in price, perhaps because surgeons have the option of performing surgeries covered by insurance and government programs.

To what extent, though, are the opportunities for surgeons to perform cosmetic surgeries in relatively private markets affecting the supply of surgeons to perform more conventional procedures in the third-party payment markets?

Third-party payments, whether the Obamacare muddle or the National Health Service or Soviet medicine, deprive consumers of the benefits of competition.  "'Networks' and third-party payment franchises are denials of opportunities to seek profit by offering trade-tested betterments."

Sorry, Jackson, reality is a pre-existing condition.  "You can allocate the resources by force, by politics, or by trade. But allocate you must, and somebody doing without might follow."  "Commodification" might be the better policy choice.  "[I]f you want to live longer and pay less, mightn't the proper policy response be to bring in more trade-tested betterments?  Start, as Edward "Captain Ed" Morrissey suggests, by recognizing that "commodification" is not a nasty word, it's simply reality."

Now consider that  "Taxes would go up, but private health insurance premiums would be eliminated, so the average American would pay substantially less."  First, we don't know that the tax burden would be less than the insurance premiums, and we have no assurance that the tax burden might be lower because the unelected bureaucrats would pretend that they were "containing costs" by screwing down the reimbursement rates and hoping the providers would continue to provide.  Second, because taxes affect behavior at the margin, we cannot be sure that the "average American" (or any American) would be better off, even spending less money on net.

Economists who study taxation understand that virtually every existing tax imposes a deadweight loss. This is a loss to society beyond the taxes collected. It arises because every tax distorts behavior.

There's even a price theory question, should there be any economics students reading me.

Someone shows you an analysis of a government spending program that finds $1.10 benefits per $1.00 in government spending. The analyst has concluded that the program is worthwhile because it passes a cost/benefit analysis. Does it? Explain why or why not.

There is always a deadweight loss.