If consumers actually directly paid the whole cost for health services (as opposed to a fixed price, like a $20 copay, etc.), the prices charged would become far more regular.
An easy way to examine this is to compare the price of over-the-counter versus pharmaceuticals. If a third party weren't paying for them, the price would have to either come down to something affordable to the average person, or else the market for it would shrink to only the wealthy.
I'm aware of your and the GP's claim, I'm saying it doesn't survive contact with reality.
If you look at e.g. the per-dose price of insulin it's as low or lower in countries with single-payer universal systems, where someone requiring insulin is never going to have any idea what it even costs, because it's just something that's provided for them should they need it.
In that case it's usually some centralized state purchaser that has an incentive to bring prices down, or a government that has an overall incentive to keep the inflation of its budgetary items down, which ultimately comes down to public elections etc.
In any case, a much more indirect mechanism than someone who'd be directly affected paying the costs associated with the product, which directly contradicts this particular argument.
Why do you even argue against someone that doesn't think "insurance" should exist? Its a troll, not even most serious libertarian freaks are that idiotic. Our goal should be to make sure these freaks have no power.
OF COURSE single-payer means lower prices, the government has a shit ton of power in negotiating prices if they want to. They don't want to because they are corrupt, freaks like the above are only there to rationalize the theft. They need to be defeated politically.
The original argument wasn't against public healthcare per se, but against the US system in which it really is run as insurance, with multiple competing providers, who therefore don't have the power to negotiate down prices.
It's very easy to find examples of abuse in this system. For example, in modern "factory towns" around corporate campuses, somehow, routine dental maintenance costs exactly the maximum amount provided for this purpose by the employee health plan.
> If consumers actually directly paid the whole cost for health services, the prices charged would become far more regular.
Which is arguing against the very idea of insurance which distributes risk, its an absurd argument not even libertarians make. The problem for literarians/neoliberals is that we already have exactly the system they think should work great, it just doesn't, but they completely refuse to ever recognize that the reason it doesn't work is systemic and it will never be fixed by more literarianism/neoliberalism, we need to shove it. Whats needed is a single-payer, universal, zero(!!!)-private, public health care system.
Why insist on single payer? It's not even dominant in Europe, and it makes the whole thing a much harder sell politically, yet there are no clear evidence that single payer is superior to other public healthcare arrangements.
An easy way to examine this is to compare the price of over-the-counter versus pharmaceuticals. If a third party weren't paying for them, the price would have to either come down to something affordable to the average person, or else the market for it would shrink to only the wealthy.