[so_real]

I disagree with your conception of "free market", AlbChi. My analogy for "free market" would include national competition in an open market, tort reform to reduce frivolous lawsuits, constricting the FDA charter to encourage new processes and procedure, and monopoly busting to make medication production more cost-affordable. In that analogy, your medical condition that once cost $15,000 per year to treat, now only costs $5,000 to treat. And if you desire to purchase insurance to share the load with healthy people, it will cost even less. Free market works.

[Paladin2]

In a world of $10,000 annual deductables, I’m all about having a plethora of medical testing organizations with a low overhead and taking just ca$h and near equivalents and allowing the “patient”/customer able to order their own tests.

[Alberta's Child]

The free market will never freely work whenever a customer and a business don't conduct business directly with each other. Adding any kind of third party -- an insurance company or a government agency -- into the transaction is inevitably going to distort prices and/or degrade quality. That's true whether the product or service you're talking about is health care, education, or an aircraft carrier.

This is why health insurance has a lot of the same problems as auto insurance. If you are involved in a crash and you take your car to the body shop for repairs, the body shop has to fix your car but really answers to the insurance company that pays the bill. You don't care how much it costs to fix the damage because you aren't paying directly for the repairs, and the insurance company doesn't care if the body shop does a good job because they aren't driving the car when the repairs are completed.

This isn't a criticism of health insurance, mind you. It's just a way of explaining that "free market" principles have serious constraints when it comes to this type of business arrangement.

[wiseprince]

Everything you said Trump is for. No one trusts him to push hard for that stuff though (I did)