[neverdem]

The free market has a way of bringing these things into balance.

How does the free market deal with mass casualties after the fact besides activating units from overstretched reserve units of the Armed Forces?

[RFEngineer]

"How does the free market deal with mass casualties after the fact besides activating units from overstretched reserve units of the Armed Forces?"

If a WMD hits New York or D.C., folks will be evacuated to more rural areas that you so lovingly refer to in a previous post. There are already plans in place to do exactly that, in a worst-case scenario.

Do you really think more hospitals in an area likely to be hit by a WMD attack would make a difference when everybody leaves those areas?

Closing these hospitals will have little, if any, effect on a WMD response, should one be required.

[NYFriend]

As you can probably appreciate, there is no free market for health care, because you'll die without it. What will you be willing to pay if you're going to die otherwise. In addition, we have significant barriers to market entry (Certificate of Need and licensing requirements for hospitals,licenses for MDs, patents in drugs, etc). That's before you get into health insurance, which throws all of this out the window anyway. I know some people don't feel like they need health insurance, or would prefer HSA or MSA, and that's fine. But, too many people want insurance, so it's going to be the dominate way of paying for care for the foreseeable future. The alternative is banning health insurance, which is not very free-market either. We can't think about health care in market terms. It could work, but it doesn't in this day and age. It's infrastructure, is a heavily regulated industry, its charity, or more accurately, its unique and the most complex industry in this country, but either way, its anything but free market.