But you accidentally identified the other major driver of cost – profit.
Profits and the profit incentive are as likely to drive down costs as they are to raise them, since you can gain a heck of a lot of market share by offering the same thing someone else is offering, but for a lower price. There is some potential basis for arguing that patent and the temporary monopoly pricing power they provide raises costs, but getting rid of patents would undermine the incentives for innovation. We as a society have decided that innovation is important enough that innovators get rewarded. I know that for people on the Left, whose sole contribution to innovation was “Rules for Radicals”, that’s a tough pill to swallow, since it means more wealth for people who actually innovate in areas where people want it.
If you spent half as much time looking at the evidence as you do denigrating me
I could spend 10 times as much time as I do denigrating you and it would be only half the denigration you deserve.
you have already conceded my main point to be correct.
No, I said that the way a public option was presented in that question, it is nearly impossible that a majority of people would not favor it. If that survey question was used in the private sector to justify building a product that wasn’t essentially given away for free, the product would fail. We used to have a saying at one of the consulting firms where I worked, “Never recommend ‘motherhood and apple pie’ to the client”, meaning, don’t go in to a client and give them options that don’t require tough decisions to be made, because not making tough decisions is the exact reason why they needed outside help. That version of the “public option” is “motherhood and apple pie”. The conjoint analysis survey I cited, where some actual cost is attached to the public option, is much more meaningful.
