Why should hospitals be forced to provide care to sick people? I mean this 100% seriously, what would you do if hospitals just straight up refused patients that were expensive or annoying to treat focusing entirely on “profitable medicine?”
“Oooo sorry Jim, there’s no money to be made in cancer patients.
The government has an interest in people having access taxi services 24/7 because it prevents DUIs and licensure/regulations is the means to ensure that.
“Well the government should provide that transportation then.” — They are via this regulation.
>Why should hospitals be forced to provide care to sick people? I mean this 100% seriously, what would you do if hospitals just straight up refused patients that were expensive or annoying to treat focusing entirely on “profitable medicine?”
They should not, unless hospitals have the power to tax. Or the hospital is getting reimbursed by the government.
>“Well the government should provide that transportation then.” — They are via this regulation.
Politicians like to do it via mandates for businesses because they can avoid being responsible for problems and have a convenient third party to blame. It also avoids them having to increase taxes.
That is exactly why most hospitals are required to take sick patients. The Emergency Medical Treatment And Labor Act requires hospitals that accept Medicare (most of them) to provide (minimal) treatment to any patient that shows up.
That works, since the hospital is getting paid for it by society (although via health insurance companies via the now neutered individual mandate to purchase health insurance).
The important thing is the price for a hospital being able to provide highly qualified team of workers and equipment 24/7 to treat patients should not be obfuscated. It is valuable information for how many more hospitals/doctors/research/ whatever is needed and which kind of work society should incentivize people to do.
Why should their licensing be different than for pilots?
With a private pilots license you can't fly for money, but you can take your friends and family with you.
With a commercial pilots license you can fly for money.
Neither of these are capped, a commercial pilots license just requires slightly more education and experience. Why should licensing for taxis be any different?
For commercial airliners carrying hundreds of passengers, yeah.
For small private planes? Slots are hardly ever the limiting factor.
Taxis are more like private jets than Airbuses carrying hundreds of pax.
While taxis aren't as good for society as buses, they still reduce the total amount of car infrastructure required. The slot comparison doesn't seem apt.
Less so than people actually driving themselves around the centres of cities.
If I drive myself to somewhere in the centre, my car will sit there using up space while I'm doing my thing. If I use a taxi, the same car that delivered me will serve other people while I'm doing my thing.
Of course it would be even better if I used public transport, but I'm not going to do that because public transport is uncomfortable at best.
> If I drive myself to somewhere in the centre, my car will sit there using up space while I'm doing my thing.
In the absence of terrible laws, it'll be stored somewhere that's more space-efficient (e.g. in a multistory car-park) compared to a taxi cruising around the main streets looking for fares.
On the contrary, America tends to waste a lot of city space with surface parking and wide roads, so taxis don't make it appreciably worse, whereas the old cities of Europe are where we really don't have space for them.
FYI in my country, at the top of this thread, that is how it works. Drivers need a "P" licence and the taxi companies need to register and follow some rules. But apart from that there are no limits or artificial restrictions.
That is one of the things that passes me off about all this. The enforcement agency did go after a bunch of drivers that were driving passengers for money without a "P" licence. Now, IIRC, Uber does require drivers to have a "P" licence.
But that same agency didn't do shit to Uber for operation of a taxi service without meeting the requirements.
Going after the little people is easy, but give up when the target has a bunch of VC money and lawyers.
We have a similar problem with our courier drivers. Everyone is "totally not an employee, they run their own independent business".
There should be no need to go after Uber, they probably shouldn't have to be the ones enforcing this. Uber can't verify if the driving license you've provided them is fake or not, at least the cops can do that.
Why should this enforcement be outsourced to Uber?
