When Blog Comments are as Good as the Posts!

A great example from a piece by Aaron Carroll on why the arguments against universal health coverage are so hollow.  The commenter writes,

I recently met a lawyer who starts out her class with an assignment to go online and make a recommendation based on quality and cost to purchase a wide screen tv. Easy. Next, the students are told to go out and find a pediatric neurologist on the same basis. Forget it, it’s impossible. There are lots of reasons for this, and plenty of blame to go around. But a key tenet of capitalism is that markets function when there is transparency and symmetric information between buyers and sellers. That is not the case here, and it never will be. So markets fail and there is a role for government. This is non-controversial everywhere in the world except in the Republican Congress, and for four radical Supreme Court judges. Guess what Justice Scalia, you’re not smarter than the rest of humanity, you’re a laughing stock.

The asymmetry of healthcare knowledge has been known for some time, ever since the classic 1963 paper UNCERTAINTY AND THE WELFARE ECONOMICS OF MEDICAL CARE by economist KENNETH  J. ARROW.  He concludes

It its the general social consensus, clearly, that the laissez-faire solution for medicine is intolerable.

This was 1963 and we're still arguing about this shit.