Our system’s biggest problem is it doesn’t allow for free market forces to force competition and drive down costs. At the same time is also has no regulations in place to prevent costs from rising. Every country in the world has decided to either make health care a utility that’s tightly controlled or allowed bad outcomes for some based on free market forces. Neither is perfect but they are more efficient than our current system.
The bottom line is our medical system has a lot of people being paid by health care spending that aren’t actually providing care. There’s excessive overhead in our health care spending. Free market systems prevent excessive overhead to the cost of providing care by competition. Tightly regulated system prevent excessive overhead by strictly regulating everything. We don’t do either so we have millions of paper pushers being paid by health care spending from insurance agent, to billing coders, to various administrative departments and boards.[/quote]
Free market forces can’t force competition if government mandates emergency services.
Let’s say you have competing garages for car services. Because of market forces, the prices are lowered for routine maintenance and repairs.
But then government came out with a law mandating all garages to take in cars in event of emergencies regardless of the ability to pay. These emergency cases are all cars that do not have routine maintenance, cars that use the lowest grade gasoline engine cars running on flats.
Suddenly the garages now have to spread the cost of these emergencies to everyone else, and the cost goes up. And then some people decide to forgo routine maintenance since they can now demand car repair at any garage’s emergency bay. Forcing prices to go up even more.
If you have a government and society at large unable to stomach the idea of patients dying outside of ERs, then that free market is not truly a free market.
This is why all industrialized developed nations all move to nationalized single payer systems. Just look at Taiwan, S.Korea, and Singapore, they all followed the American model of free market capitalism to developed world status. And the moment they got there, they all switched to the European model old single payer universal coverage.
