loquitur

Actually, the free market does work with health care, we just don't happen to have it, and haven't had a free market in health care for several decades. Health care is intensely regulated, health insurance is intensely regulated. There hasn't been any thing even remotely approximating a free market for health care since Medicare was enacted back in the mid-60s, and probably even earlier, back to WW2, when the only way an employer could raise compensation in an era of price controls was to provide non-wage comp in the form of (among other things) health insurance. If anything, health care is your quintessential example of screwing everything up by getting in the way of the free market, and then keeping on tinkering to the point that it's so complicated no normal person can understand it - which just opens avenues for slick operators to take advantage.

I remain convinced that we should outlaw third party payments for routine health care. In other words, make everyone uninsured. That would bring prices down so fast it would make your head spin - people simply won't stand for the bullshit pricing structures we see now if they had to pay for it out of their own pockets. Right now there is no pricing discipline because people don't pay for their own care. And prices of pharma would go down too, for the same reason. Health insurance should be true insurance, i.e. for unforeseen/unforeseeable disasters. Routine stuff should be paid out of people's own pockets, just like their rent and phone and cable. ("Benefits" are a form of compensation, which means that if this plan was enacted, pretty much all of what your employer otherwise spends on your health insurance would end up in your pocket as wages.) I know we'd need to have some sort of co-op bulk buying program for people with chronic conditions that require regular medication. But net, net, everyone except the insurance companies would benefit. And it won't require another Rube-Goldberg-style government program, either.

A few years ago, I wanted to have my family go "naked" on health insurance - cover only catastrophic, and pay for doctor visits and medicine out of our own pockets. I had calculated that we would come out ahead by some huge amount of money. My wife wouldn't hear of it.