Great, the "free market has failed" drone... [sad2]I could cover most ordinary expenses out of pocket effortlessly. The problem comes with medications, which until two just went generic this year, were running me $4000 per year. Then you add on to that the PT I had last year, marginally covered by health insurance, which cost me $3000. Add into that my annual insurance premiums and you're talking $18,000 per year. -And forget Dental, that's another $6k per year for my family, not including premiums.
We don't have a free market in healthcare and there are few alive who have ever seen one. The cost mushrooming you are complaining about is not the free market run amok. It is medicare, insurance regulation, and anti-trust cartels protected by and created by government and its regulation.
Much like student loan debt, the problem is not the market. Student loans have mushroomed because government lending has mushroomed. The market expanded to consume the available cash thrown at it - EXACTLY like healthcare has in response to all the regulations and tax policies that do the same.
Almost every (perhaps every) complaint you have and detail you can describe WRT costs of medical care that you attribute to the market is actually a consequence of the arrogance of government and the gullibility of the public in believing them when they claim they can make it better with regulation.
The fundamental, "fix this and you fix everything else with healthcare," is the disconnect between producer and consumer. We don't pay for things directly so we have no idea how much they cost until well after the fact. Providers often don't even know how much they are charging. All of this is because of the abuse of the concept of insurance and the regulation that has followed. You cannot insure that which is certain or even almost certain to occur. That you just have to pay for. Insurance requires a RISK, not a certainty of occurrence to be anything more than just a transaction cost.
Publicly this regulation has been to "control costs". In reality, much of that regulation has been the result of insurance companies lobbying to protect their profits by force of law against the pressures of the market you so hate.
If we paid for regular care/products directly, in cash then the only items of concern would be much more statistically rare events for which there would be catastrophic coverage.
If we did not bundle our insurance through employers (an idiot result of tax laws and wage controls of the post WWII era), then there would be little issue of "pre-existing conditions" for this sort of insurance.
If we did not have the medicare, HMO, insurance cartels, then we would not see price fixing, collusion and market exclusionary practices that inflate costs.
All of these issues are caused by government intervention and all of them have been with us for decades because of, wait for it...
POLICIES AND AGENDAS OF THE DEMOCRAT PARTY GOING BACK TO FDR.
Now, to be fair, the GOP has adopted many of those policies in recent decades as well, so they too are to blame for taking AARP money to save medicare when it should be killed and SS when it should be shut down.
More importantly though, the failure of the GOP here is IN BEHAVING LIKE DEMOCRATS by adopting FDR style "new deal" statist policies.
Same goes for gun laws. Yes, you are correct that the GOP has plenty of blood on their hands, but in those cases, which were generally the exception to the historical rule of the party, they were generally falling in line with policies of the broader DNC agenda.
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