1. Bolded part: The evolution means multiple deaths due to poor care. Also competition is a dynamic thing not a static process. It is not that after x months, people will know the good from the bad private providers (in that process itself people have died). Players exit the market, others enter it, established ones change their practices, monopolies form, etc. Just because your initial experience with one place is positive does not mean it will continue to be that way. (Additional people die as they keep figuring this out).
Healthcare is not a TV, healthcare demand is mostly price- and supply-inelastic, and it is essential. When you're ill, you are not going from place to place to read Yelp reviews, check ambulance prices, bargain for procedures, ask which scans can be excluded, etc. You may have a relationship with a doctor but the hospital has some prohibitive fees or maybe likes taking an extra X-ray to make more money. In this system, you have to calculate these various things, knowing that they can change over time, and make your best decision, all the whle you're ill and your life might hinge on the outcome. It is pure absurdity.
2. The space program from both the USSR and USA showed the overwhelmingly quick and successful results if governments can throw money and resourcesa at a problem. It is only after the defunding of NASA and the collapse of the USSR that the scientists, trained at government expense, wth government-generated past knowledge, have been absorbed by private industry. India is a country with a notoriously corrupt government, whose space agency can launch satellites at roughly the same rates, sometimes lower, than SpaceX, without having the benefit of a pre-trained workforce.
3. Focusing on actual private sector products: the iPhone, batteries, etc. A lot of the technologies used in mobile phones has come from government departments as varied as the
communications industry of the Soviet Union and the
US Dept of Defence. No competition. Antibiotics and the polio vaccine was developed by scientists not operating in a competitive market.
So I take massive issue with that line. Does it mean the state can solve all problems? No, but it means the competition is not necessarily the answer.
And in fact this ties in with your posts on climate change. "The rewards are so great the company will solve it." Then why has the cost of solar panels been driven down most prominently by work in Germany and China, both on massive govt subsidies? Where is the plucky startup destroying the field to make a trillion dollars?
You seem to have a very Econ 101 view of what the world looks like, but even there it is made clear that there are many asssumptions to get the fantasy of perfect ompetitive markets. Individual players in most markets are massive, not so small that their effects will not be felt by the aggregate. As shown by Uber and Lyft and Amazon, firms with more resources can operate at a loss to create a barrier for entry into their markets against startups. There has been a lot of talk about information assymetry. Just like that, 3 of 7 assumptions of perfect competition are gone.
No, there are very strong reasons for the market not to solve climate change. The funds, firms and individuals who own the bulk of the market are interested in returns in the short and medium term. This makes sense, to paraphrase, in the long run we are all dead. A who invested in solar in the 90s would be dead before their investment bore fruit in terms of massive profits. B who invested in oil at the same time would be much richer. B would be correct, he was interested in profit maximisation and he got the rewards. The future rewards for investing in solar aren't going to matter to A, he's long dead. Short-term profit thinking dominates a lot of companies, and for good reason. It is profit maximisation in action. The type of firms that can afford to take long-term risks are Google or Amazon, whose existence violates perfect competition.
