I'm curious why you would make that analogy. Differences between the TV and health care markets aside, last time I checked, the US has perhaps both the least-regulated and most expensive health care system in the industrialized world.
It is difficult to argue about this because there's no good unit of measurement for regulations.
But I would look at practitioner licensing, drug availability, tort law, and insurance requirements. My impression is that the USA is highly regulated (and more importantly, poorly regulated) in those areas.
I don't think you know how regulated health care is in the US. For instance, for all the talk about insurance companies being for profit, most don't realize that a lot were nonprofit until the government made that illegal.
Health care is a labor intensive good. Labor is more expensive in the US than in most other parts of the world, particularly high skilled labor. A haircut or a yoga lesson also costs more in the US than in most other countries for this same reason.
Further, the US healthcare market has more regulations than you think. One example: in most of the world, you buy birth control pills at the store for cheap. In the US, you must first pay a doctor for permission.
Health care is dramatically less expensive in nearby Canada. Moreover, health care costs are increasing in the USA faster than any other country.
It is true that some US regulations do drive up costs -- you mentioned one. There are lots of other perverse incentives in the US system, because there are so many powerful players looking out for their own interests -- HMOs, hospital networks, drug manufacturers, politicians.
I would hate to see the usual libertarian/socialist debate ensue here on HN. I would like to challenge people who participate in this thread to not react reflexively, but go look up the actual data and understand what you're debating.
In the USA, many people who criticize single-payer health care don't have the first clue about it. They believe it's more expensive than the USA, there's more bureaucracy and paperwork, that there's less choice of doctors... all of which are false. False, as in not true. It doesn't matter what Milton Friedman says the world is supposed to be like. Or if you have to have a theoretical foundation before you'll believe data, go check out the foundational paper in health economics, "Uncertainty and the welfare economics of medical care", by Kenneth Arrow.
That said, back to the original post, which is about broadband regulation -- again, I urge people to go look at what happens in other countries, or indeed what happened in the USA in earlier times, when economic policies were based on data and the overall good of the country, instead of ideology.
I'm not sure if I would have classified broadband as a "right" (it seems to cheapen other rights, IMO). But faced with industries that often create natural monopolies or oligopolies (telecom is the textbook example) regulation with the goal of universal service can have good effects.
The 95'th percentiles are more or less the same between the US and canada ($154k in Canada, $165 in the US), but things just diverge dramatically after that point. The average over the top 5% works out to be $296,000 in Canada and $416,000 in the US.
Why would you expect health care costs to behave differently from other high skill jobs?
By the way, the most important paper in health care economics is "The Effect of Coinsurance on the Health of Adults" (http://www.rand.org/pubs/reports/2006/R3055.pdf). Everyone ignores it because the conclusion is counterintuitive, but it is bar none the highest quality study ever performed on health care economics.
> In the USA, many people who criticize single-payer health care don't have the first clue about it.
Actually, many do.
About half the US population gets its healthcare via some US govt. (FWIW, The VA was just found to have given HIV to about 1800 people.) It isn't any cheaper or more effective than the private system(s).
If the US govt is capable of delivering healthcare effectively, why isn't it?
That's why I wanted to give Obama a free hand wrt the folks that US govts already serve, with no increase in per-capita budget. And, since govt health care is supposed to be cheaper, the per-capita budget goes down 5%/year for years 3-6 (which is a bit over 20%). The savings can be spent on covering additional people or other programs.
For some reason, Obamacare advocates don't like that proposal.
Here's my take. If you don't think that the next generation is going to pay your social security, what makes you think that it's going to pay your healthcare? That said, I appreciate that you're volunteering to pay mine.
