Our Great Helath Care System

[Jenny A]

At risk of sounding *gasp* conservative, which I am fiscally, the problem with healthcare is that it's divorced from the market.

We mostly pay for healthcare with insurance. The insurance is not analogous to fire or auto-insurance as it's intended to pay for ordinary expected expenses as well as catastrophic ones---sort of like if your auto insurance paid for oil changes. The result is something like this: Suppose that unless you had grocery insurance, you had to buy groceries at a highly inflated price to allow the government and grocery insurance companies to get 80% discounts from the grocery store. You take your cart into the dirty ill stocked store with only one brand name per item and no prices. Some items have been deemed unnecessary by the government (like chocolate, wine and inexplicably wheat gluten) and are not carried or must be bought elsewhere or cannot be bought on your plan though they are there on the shelves tantalizing you. You fill your cart with this non-competitive stuff and pay a $5 co-pay at check-out. A year later your grocery insurance is doubled because you and the people in your grocery insurance group bought too much.