Time for European style socialized medine

[TaraJo]

The point of a free market is that if this happens, anyone can set up a competing company to challenge the might of the larger one. A free-market is entirely consumer driven, so as long as you have people such as yourself who don't like large corporations trying to gain a monopoly, you will have other companies form who will refuse to merge with those larger companies.

I can see the benefit of anti-trust laws when it comes to a finite resource, but healthcare insurance is not a finite resource, since all the services are abstract. You pay money for the insurance, which isn't a physical thing, and then when you need to use it, your insurance company pays for your hospital bills.

Free market is good. Heck, it's great, but the government still needs to protect that free market from corruption. What if one company gets really popular or buys out their competition or all the companies join together and they decide to offer a special payment plan to the hospital as long as that hospital doesn't accept any other insurance company. And then they go around and make that same deal with every hospital in the area? Sure, someone could go out and form a new health insurance company, but nobody is going to do any business with them if the hospitals won't/can't accept their insurance.

And that's just an example or potential for corruption that I thought of off the top of my head. I'm sure I could think of more if I had more time. I don't really think the corporations are malicious as much as I think there's a kind of corporate survival of the fittest at play and if the environment allows underhanded deals, the companies that survive are going to be the ones who use underhanded deals like that. My political philosophy says that the basic job of the government is to protect the people and in this case, part of that protection is to protect us from abuses from big corporations.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39516346/ns/...home-burn/

"Firefighters did eventually show up, but only to fight the fire on the neighboring property, whose owner had paid the fee."

Like I said before, it's all about the risk you run. That's the point of a risk...it can go one way or the other. Sometimes a person who doesn't buy fire insurance will never have an incident. Other times, their house will catch fire 3 times in one year. I'll mention at this point that I don't agree with the fire insurance setup in the article I quoted. I think that if you don't pay the yearly fee, and your house catches on fire, you should simply be slapped with a very large bill for the service, at least large enough to convince (the majority) people that the $75 a year is worth it.

I can agree with that last part more. I don't like the 'let their house burn' idea, simply because if my house is next door and I've paid my firefighter fee, my house is at risk if their house burns. The larger the fire gets over there, the harder it's going to be to prevent it from damaging my house. However, in said case, we also have to look at some of what's happening with health insurance companies. Pre existing conditions, conditions that aren't covered under certain policies, companies who change their mind about paying after the treatment has been done..... I worry about what kind of tricks could be pulled off if we needed fire insurance as well. Can you imagine a fire fighter coming to your house, but refusing to put out the fire because your car is on fire and the house is covered but not the car? Or if a tree outside catches fire, they don't mess with it because you only have the house itself covered, not the tree outside? Or changing their mind about coverage after the fire's been fought already?