United States District Court DC circuit judge Amit Mehta recently opined that in general search services, “Google is a monopolist.”
It’s interesting how products that are suboptimal for users are able to predominate. This is glaring with search engines.
Search Engines
Google Search provides users many results that are significantly different than the results the users prefer.
Further, search results that are biased in any direction nudge a user to form an opinion that’s biased in the same direction. When someone tries to control them, most people resist.
The reason a search engine that’s suboptimal for users is able to predominate is that for users, this search engine is free. Users aren’t the real customers. The real customers are the advertisers.
Inside the advertisers’ organizations, the major deciders are corporate Progressives.
This means that government people don’t need to put their thumb on the scales in the search market directly. Government people can just create privileges for schools that churn out Progressives.
Health-Payment Systems
A whole product class that’s suboptimal for users but that’s also able to predominate is health-payment systems.
Such systems are commonly called health insurance, but that’s misleading.
A health-payment system doesn’t chiefly insure against rare, significant losses by sharing risks. Rather, a health-payment system chiefly uses contracts to ensure that all health payments—especially the payments for routine preventive care and diagnostics—are forced through the health-payment system. A health-payment system is forced onto everyone in the neighborhood, much like an organized-crime protection racket.
Such rackets take away a substantial cut of the action for their own people. If the racket wasn’t there, the neighborhood people wouldn’t pay that cut at all.
Health-payment systems’ cuts are disguised. Health-product producers charge hefty list prices to everyone who doesn’t pay for protection, and offer heavily-discounted prices to everyone who pays for protection. Many patients have their costs paid by governments, so they don’t control, pay attention to, or even see much of the pricing. Many other patients have payroll deductions they stop paying attention to and have copays that are small, so it feels to them like their health products are nearly free.
Like with search engines, the problem with health-payment systems is that the users—here, the patients—aren’t the real customers. The real customers are, in many cases, government payers. The real customers in the remaining cases are, again, corporate Progressives.
So then in the health-payment market, government people do put their thumb on the scales directly. They take our property and use it to give others payments for a large fraction of health products. When they do, they direct the payments to health-payment systems, not to us patients ourselves.
Government people also put their thumb on the scales indirectly. They do this the same as in the case of search engines, by just creating privileges for schools that churn out Progressives.
The Middlemen
The best-proven way to enable users to weed out suboptimal products is to cut out the middlemen.
On search engines, competing search-engine producers could charge users subscription fees.
On health-payment systems, government people shouldn’t be taking our property, charging administrative costs, and handing out health payments in the first place. Government people should appropriately repeal tax deductions, entitlements, and all other rules that favor their health-payment system cronies.
We patients should be free to just shop for ourselves for catastrophic-care insurance, routine preventive care, and routine diagnostic care, guided by product-review producers and consultants. Health products are products, after all.
As an alternative, it might be feasible to keep the middlemen but neutralize them.
Government people could repeal all privileges for schools that churn out Progressives. In time, the mix of corporate managers who place ads on search engines could become more balanced, so then the ads and incentives would become more balanced.
The mix of government people who decide on health products and payments might conceivably become more balanced. Government people might direct their health payments to us patients themselves.
But in every possible case, getting government people to take different actions will require electing different politicians.
Parties and Entrepreneurs
Currently, selection and election of Progressives is heavily favored by both major parties’ rules and practices. Such rules and practices will need to be reversed by at least one good party.
The party will need to stay good, so it will need to have limited enumerated powers, and separated, offsetting powers. A good party could be started by freedom caucuses, by an independent presidential candidate, or by county-region governments within individual states, which secede from the legacy state governments in their states.
Entrepreneurs will also be needed, who offer better search engines, and who offer health products unbundled from the health-payment systems that have been.
No products are free. Products that are presented as free to use may be the costliest to freedom and health.
When you think about it, this shouldn’t be surprising. Governments themselves are first experienced by people as free to use, starting when people are in school. Taxes continue to be concealed by withholding them from paychecks, so people soon numb to this fine print and stop seeing this as their own money (which it is, but which they as individuals can’t claw back from governments’ grabbing hands). Governments, in fact, are the costliest products we pay for.
When you yourself choose and pay for a product, you get what you pay for.
When you instead use “free” products, they’re way costlier than the price you would pay for them outright. Because you end up with far less freedom.
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