[quote=ocrenter]
You do realize you have a huge black hole known as the ER. Where people not covered and not able to afford fee for service will simply allow whatever that ills them to worsen until it becomes bad enough to be life-threatening and thereby the ER can not turn them away.
China runs a very good free market health care system. But they allow people that can’t pay for the ER to die outside the doors.
That is a key ingredient in a successful free market health care system.[/quote]
I’m not saying free market system don’t have their consequences. Every system has in consequences to various degrees. In very socialized system you wait a long time for elective procedures or you don’t get them at all. In other system you die if you can’t pay and charity refuses to save you. In our system everyone gets treated and almost everyone has access to the latest and best procedures but at a tremendous cost.
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.
