“it is irrelevant that the free market provides best in most areas, because in this area it does not.”
In what way whatsoever is the current health care market free? It is the most heavily-regulated space in the economy that hasn’t yet been outright nationalized. Government tells insurers what coverage they have to offer, how they can price and rate it, under what conditions they may decline or cancel coverage, etc. It even manipulates who can pay for it by making it advantageous for employers to deduct money from paychecks instead of letting people buy their own insurance or even, *gasp*, pay a doctor directly.
The simple fact is that the health care space is dominated by government to such a degree that the one condition needed for a free market to work doesn’t exist. The people receiving health care don’t pay for it. They don’t even pay an insurer to cover it. Their employers or the government pay the insurer to pay the doctor. Under ObamaCare, employers or the government pay the insurer to pay the doctor. The systemic flaw is not fixed. In fact, it’s made worse by cementing the flaw further by burying it under a new federal bureaucracy.
Put simply, any claim that our current health care crisis is a failure of the free market is pure fantasy. The government has regulated any hint of a free market out of the health care sector, and the morass that remains is a combination of historical accidents, pseudo-market mechanisms, and flat-out nationalized programs. Our current crisis is a failure of government, and can only be fixed by freeing health care from government.
