alt Hacker NewsThe answer to all of your questions is that if you are obscenely well off, all of these restrictions go away with enough money. Private insurance exists, or hell - just paying out of pocket. It is a free market, but only for those with enough money to pay.
The average person cannot pay. Health insurance is designed to maximize extraction of wealth from the non-wealthy, while doing just barely enough that they don't immediately get regulated away. The reason for this is greed: sure, greed drives efficiency in capitalism, but if it isn't reined in via regulation we wind up with the abomination we have today.
> More regulation is almost certainly the worst possible option, we've been on that path since WW2
We have de-regulated. In 1950, stock buybacks were illegal, the top corporate tax was 42%, and the top personal income tax was 91%. Today, companies buy back their stocks (transferring wealth to shareholders faster than dividends), top corp tax is 21%, and top income tax is 37%.
Sure, in some cases there is more regulation: factories can't dump waste into the rivers, and employers can't discriminate by race or whatever. But none of these things are the reason why healthcare has become unobtainable to many in the US.
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>employers can't discriminate by race
Seems to be flaunted in tech.
> sure, greed drives efficiency in capitalism, but if it isn't reined in via regulation we wind up with the abomination we have today.
This is exactly where we part ways though. You specifically said "laissez-faire", i.e. "leave it alone" in French; economically this is anti-interventionist, let the markets sort themselves out without interference from government. You are saying regulation is required for the market to function or it leads to what we have today and I'm pointing out that we already have enormous quantities of regulation in healthcare. I pointed out several very easy examples to identify with but by no means is that an exhaustive list of healthcare interventions. The very thing you are advocating for, regulations, has been increasingly attempting to "fix" this market for the past 80 years and our current system exists because of it, not in spite of it. It is not a free market in any sense of the word, and doubling down on more regulation will not improve it. I am more than happy to debate an actual free market or nationalized healthcare model, but further regulating this "free" market is misdiagnosing the system we currently have and assumes the same good intentions that have failed to improve it for four generations will somehow produce better results this time.