I like this point from Ethicurean commenter Eric Reuter, responding to someone who brags that "As an entrepreneur, I have no qualms paying for my healthcare out of my own pocket."
As a fellow self-considered entrepreneur, I could agree with you in theory. I would love to have my insurance priced solely on the risk the companies are taking on me (as someone whose life insurance application was at first denied because the company didn't believe the stats from the nurse's exam). But if you're going to advocate the free-market solution, you'd better do it right. Are you willing to support the ability of insurance companies to truly and accurate price risk by tracking your food consumption, daily exercise levels, genetic medical history, and to change your rates as needed to reflect the new risk as you age? Are you sure you'll have enough money to cover your entire life, even in your 90s as your body and mind break down, your bills mount, and the only thing standing between you and the gutter is the pocketbook you now hope will remain stuffed through the coming decades regardless of rising health care costs?Even if you're clean, healthy, and in all other ways an extraordinary physical specimen at the moment, are you willing to face the larger consequences in the society surrounding you when many who (even if through their own fault) cannot afford the health care that they need? Can you look a Coke addict in the eye and watch them die of diabetes because they can't pay for the care, even if it's their own fault?
Free market types tend to be a bit cagey on how far they want the free market to go, and what exactly they're willing to endure to get it there. And with good reason. The market for televisions wouldn't work if you wouldn't let people who couldn't afford a TV walk out of the store without one. And the market for health care won't work if you refuse to let people die in the gutter because they can't purchase an angioplasty. If society decides it can't say no when someone calls 911, then the medical industry knows it doesn't have to say yes when they try and bargain down the price. But people are rarely comfortable with the implications of the "die-in-the-gutter" plan even though it would indeed make for a much more efficient, and much freer, market. When people talk about "free market" health care, they tend to assume the market will make health care "better." But the market doesn't make things "better." It makes them more efficient. Sometimes that's better, sometimes that's not. Depends how you define better.
