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> * This whole idea of "free market is more efficient for healthcare" has to die*

The current US healthcare system has very little to do with "free markets"!




"The current US healthcare system has very little to do with 'free markets'!"

Sure, the US health care system is certainly not governed by wide open competition, transparent pricing or similar things. But it certainly has something to do with the "free markets".

The system is basically "what you get when you realize you have to insure and regulate but you never, ever do it in a centralized rational way, 'cause that would be socialism - plus you never, ever separate an 'entrepreneur' from a real or potential stream profits". Which indeed, builds the worst of all possible systems, sending risks to the consumer and profits to the investor/rent-seekers.

And from here, we could go forward to actual socialized, state-run medicine as functions adequately in most industrialized economies or back to a "wild west" system, where costs are lower, treatment is often OK and the heroin runs in large rivers as due the fatal scams(as was the US' 19th century health care reality).


Medicine changed so much after ~1880 (or maybe ~1900) that there's little to learn from the prior era.




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