[hinckley buzzard]

Just so. You could also add, that the "free market" approach to health care will no longer work because the supply is fixed, the demand is optional only at the margins, so costs are inelastic; healthcare in the main does not respond to the usual rules of supply and demand. A treatment that costs 15,000 a year will not come down to 5000 just because people want it to, or because they stop buying it. With their life at stake, they will buy it somehow.

[Alberta's Child]

That’s all true, but keep in mind that many of those treatments only exist because someone other than the patient is paying for them. In that sense, an expensive medical treatment is like an aircraft carrier. I don’t know anyone who is in the market for one personally, but someone produces them and makes a lot of money selling them.