[joseph.aman]

It’s certainly understandable to want to keep insurance for the more catastrophic (and therefore expensive) health issues that might arise. But it seems to me that insurance of any kind is poison when applied to healthcare and that there is no place for it at all in a free market economy. It will drive up costs wherever it’s allowed to operate.

Healthcare is full of difficult choices, often with life and death importance. Insurance simply maintains the grand illusion that those choices are not necessary. In a free-market economy, each person and family should have the freedom to finance their own healthcare with services available at a reasonable cost or on reasonable terms if ‘out of pocket’ payment is not possible. Simple as that.

Any and all insurance applied to healthcare is already socialism, it seems to me, even if it is provided by a private, for-profit enterprise. State-sponsored insurance like ‘Obamacare’ simply takes this ‘free market socialism’ of private insurance to its logical conclusion…. genuine socialism. And this may probably be even better than the half-baked ‘private’ version that we have now. The rest of the ‘socialized’ developed world can’t be completely wrong.

It’s simply not possible in the matter of healthcare, it seems to me, to have our insurance and a free market, too.