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To: berstbubble
The problem with the health care system in the US is that it is not based upon free market forces.

True.

Prices are determined by several forces, the buggest of which are the real cost of the item/service and the second is the price that the market is willing to pay.

No such animal as "real cost". We have free enterprise prices, and varieties of regulated and restricted unfree prices.

When I go to the doctor and pay out of my pocket I have to compete with the hugely inflated prices that are paid by the big insurance companies. You pay $10 for an aspirin because Blue Cross says that is what they are willing to pay, so everyone pays that.

The current insurance system has vast amounts of regulation and restriction, which usually benefits the surviving players, by acting like an herbicide on smaller competitors.

The only way to make the health care system responsive to the market is to make insurance illegal.

Wrong. You have just said, in effect, that the only way to to restore the market is to ban the market.

We would all have to pay out of pocket and the service provider would have to compete with other providers by being effective and cost competitive.

The "service provider" doesn't compete much now, because of a vast array of anti-freedom laws, regulations, giveaways, and credit card government.

What we have now is pseudo-socialism but the insurance "collective" is "for profit" interested in maximizing profit, sometimes by shorting the clients on services.

We do have socialism or psuedo-socialism, but it comes from the criminalization of free enterprise medicine.

Profit through free enterprise and charity through free association would bring down the cost and increase the quality of medicine for all.

34 posted on 07/06/2007 7:59:27 PM PDT by secretagent
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To: secretagent

You confuse “medicine” with health insurance. Free market forces will only regulate the cost of medical care when the financial relationship is between the recipient and the provider. Problems come from the third party, insurers, who come in between. The cost is no longer what I am willing to pay, but what a corporation is willing to pay on my behalf. This raises the cost for all, insured or not.


36 posted on 07/07/2007 8:07:49 AM PDT by berstbubble
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