It doesn't matter if they are anarcho-capitalists. If you are are in favour of socialised medicine like the NHS, that doesn't make you biased when you present arguments if favour of that.
Did you see the graph?
So are businesses. If you lower prices, you get more customers. It happens with cars, phones and lots of other things. The only difference between that and medicine is that the government gets involved to try to help people.
You are severely misinformed when it comes to Shkreli. He bought the rights to a drug for Toxoplasmosis, which is a complication of HIV (and cancer and maybe some other illness, I can't recall). The demand for this drug is way less than for HIV both because the amount of people who contract it each year is significantly less and because you only need one course of pills, whereas HIV suffers need to take medication over their whole lifetime.
Patents are something which are uncompetitive. Shkreli was able to raise the prices on because he had a monopoly on the drug? Why do we have patents? That's correct: the government.
I don't know too much about the Epipens but if someone else wants to make them, they can. If no-one make them for less then that is their true price.
That sounds like crony capitalism, not actual capitalism. People lobbying the government and getting a favour means they don't have to compete. The problem isn't the business side of things, it's the government side of things. Leave healthcare alone and the only way people offering healthcare will be able to get an advantage on their competitor is lower prices.
Most of what you have said is an argument for less government involvement. And i'll repeat: it's not a bad thing that healthcare providers are looking to make as much money as they can. That's the way it works with every other business and it helps to keep prices low. You might say that there's something different about healthcare which stops lower prices from happening and i'll agree: it's the government. It's not because healthcare has been operating in a free market: it's because it hasn't been operating in a free market.
1. I'm inherently skeptical to any "think tank" that leans to much to either side politically.
2. There is a HUGE difference between providing a medical service and say selling hamburgers. The former is not a consumer good we enjoy because we feel like it, it's a (often life dependent) necessity and the latter is not. Also as bad as HMO's in the US are, they are in the current system a necessary evil because there is no way in hell a regular person could foot an hospital bill on their own. An average sized hospital in Norway had a wage-bill at around 1 billion£ and treated around 600.000 patients, that means each patient (on average of course) had to pay 1,600£ for a hospital visit and that only covered WAGES. This is of course a ridiculous hypothetical and if you went to the hospital with a sprained ankle, then yeah you would probably be better off, but say if you had to have invasive surgery with a long recovery time, things could get really, really expensive.
People buy insurance because their house might burn down, not because they like paying for insurance, it's the same with medical care. Most people luckily won't "need" their insurance because they won't get really ill or have their home destroyed, but they need insurance in case it happens, because they can't handle those expenses on their own.
Also, i feel like you are missing the larger point here. I don't pay taxes because i like paying them. But because i firmly believe a society should take care of those who need it, and having free/affordable healthcare is a vital part of that
3. You are not seriously defending Shkreli are you? No matter how you angle it, hes a grade-a c*nt
4.
"I don't know too much about the Epipens but if someone else wants to make them, they can. If no-one make them for less then that is their true price."
People with diabetes are completely dependent on these things and could in worst case die without them, so yeah, there is demand alright. The issue here is that the price has soared the last couple of years, making a completely necessary and life saving drug much more expensive than it should be. The cost of producing them are the same, it's just that the company that made them decided they wanted a bigger profit
5.
"it's not a bad thing that healthcare providers are looking to make as much money as they can. That's the way it works with every other business and it helps to keep prices low."
. Yes that IS a bad thing. It's a terrible thing. Are you familiar with Maslow's hierarchy of needs? At the very bottom there is the most basic of human physiological needs (water, food, medicine) that we need to survive at the most fundamental level. Opening this up for monetary gain is reprehensible. And i'm not a cretin, i know "food costs money", but people in developed countries are hardly starving to death
Say if we abolished the states and sold our water supplies to a private company. Suddenly they could start demanding money for water out of your tap. "
Are you thirsty you bastard? What is that, dying of dehydration? Well you better pay up then". Hyperbole i know, but it's not that far away in principle.
You model could only work in a world where everyone was a healthy, working adult. The reality is, there are loads of sick and old people (inconvenient i know) who needs a lot of medical aid. Flying a plane or buying a car is not the same as having surgery. The introduction of removable parts and the moving assembly line DID make for tremendous cost cuts in consumable goods, but it's not how medicine works
Maybe one day soon they invent the medical assembly line where you put sick people on a conveyor belt, robots heal them and they come out the other side fit as a fiddle, but until then i can't imagine a lazzise faire model like that ever working