In article . com,
RickH wrote:

the competition to stay in business. Right now the health care
"market" is not really a market, because real markets have open price
disclosure with customers shopping for value.

Since the 60s the office of the actuary for Medicare has done a yearly
survey of the health accounts. They have found that since '64 or so the
out-of-pcoket expense (including OOP for premiums) of all healthcare in
the US has gone down from around 50% to around 18%. At the same time,
the % of GDP for healthcare has gone in the opposite direction.
Coincedence? I think not. (g). You subsidize 80% of anything and see
what happens to the costs.
ALso those who pay for insurance (mostly employers) are not the ones
who actually use it. If you look at from this standpoint, the price
containment actions of hte insurance companies make perfect sense since
their main customer isn't the patient, but the employer.
Generally, I point these issues out and then suggest that we might
want to actually TRY free market healthcare before we ditch the option.