News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious biased sources will be removed at the mods’ discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted separately but not to the post body. Sources may be checked for reliability using Wikipedia, MBFC, AdFontes, GroundNews, etc.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source. Clickbait titles may be removed.
Posts which titles don’t match the source may be removed. If the site changed their headline, we may ask you to update the post title. Clickbait titles use hyperbolic language and do not accurately describe the article content. When necessary, post titles may be edited, clearly marked with [brackets], but may never be used to editorialize or comment on the content.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials, videos, blogs, press releases, or celebrity gossip will be allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis. Mods may use discretion to pre-approve videos or press releases from highly credible sources that provide unique, newsworthy content not available or possible in another format.
7. No duplicate posts.
If an article has already been posted, it will be removed. Different articles reporting on the same subject are permitted. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners or news aggregators.
All posts must link to original article sources. You may include archival links in the post description. News aggregators such as Yahoo, Google, Hacker News, etc. should be avoided in favor of the original source link. Newswire services such as AP, Reuters, or AFP, are frequently republished and may be shared from other credible sources.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
A "free market" is an idealist concept for something that can not exist in the real world under capitalism. In a system where resources are distributed based on capital, and resources themselves are capital, oligopolies and monopolies are logically inevitable and the market is never a level playing field.
The reality is that many goods and services have poor elasticity or are inelastic. A "free market" completely falls apart when it meets such variables. This includes healthcare – there is no economic incentive for the owning class to keep prices as low as possible, as people need healthcare and many times people will die without it. The way to make the most profit in that situation is for businesses in an area to simply make prices as high as legally possible and bury patients in debt, or for businesses to collaborate on price, etc.
This is doubly true when considering that people often don't have a choice as to where they go to receive healthcare in many scenarios, there is no "just go to a different hospital" or "just get an ambulance from a different provider" or even "stop going to the only doctor in your area and instead drive 2 hours away whenever you want to go see one, and you have to have a car to do that". So even in the completely unrealistic fake scenario that healthcare providers would otherwise have an incentive to "compete" on lowering price, this fact alone almost completely topples that. There is little to no choice a majority of the time.
People like to think of a "free market" but in real life the most profitable thing to do often times isn't a good outcome for consumers. Just look how fucked up privatized rail caused transport in the US to be. And look at the healthcare system... which has sucked ever since it was a market. And look at the parking meters in Chicago. The complete and utter failure of those systems isn't caused by "we regulate it too much". Public services becoming private just causes them to become anti-consumer.
This isn't healthcare-exclusive, but healthcare is so important and the system is so abusable that it must be owned by the public for society to be functional. A system where basic necessities aren't commoditized is the only solution to make sure people have free access to basic necessities.
Also you fail to consider that monopolies and oligopolies come from somewhere. That somewhere is the "free market". They didn't just spontaneously pop into existence because of big government or whatever, they came into existence because of the lack of regulation and still exist because of there being extremely poor regulation. It is just a fact of the capitalist free market that people with more capital than others have the capacity to gain more capital, and people with less capital are prone to lose capital. There is no system that isn't heavily regulated that consistently prevents a minority of entities in a market from accumulating a majority of resources over time. Corporatism emerges from free markets, and there is no solution short of extreme regulation for the problem (although the ideal solution is to just publicize all necessities and services important to the general population outright)