"Either way," asks Peter Suderman, "would a largely or fully public health care system, like Ezra wants, solve the problem of lack of patient knowledge?" Absolutely not. Libertarians have a tendency to simply extrapolate their opinions out, and assume that liberals hold the same views, only with more state thrown in. This is why many act as if liberals believe the expansion of the state to be an intrinsic good, just as libertarians believe its contraction to be an end in itself. And it's what Peter is doing here. The liberal vision on health care, however, is not the libertarian's dream of a perfect market, checked by individual consumer preferences, but paid for by the government. Most liberals think that implausible. In the aggregate, the individual consumer will never have enough information or enough expertise to exert effective control over the medical industry. People don't comparison shop when they have a heart attack, they don't know how to effectively contrast chemotherapy providers when their doctor tells them they need to start treatment now. Confronting illness -- much less physical trauma -- is not like buying a television. You can't walk away from the deal, and you're in a terrific state of fear and urgency before you ever speak to a salesman. Which is why liberal solutions don't try and force the individual into a governing role he or she is not equipped to assume. That's not to say we don't want to give them the maximum possible information and price transparency, but we don't believe that to be a sufficient answer to the health care crisis. An actual solution will require reforms far above the level of the individual. The incentives of providers will have to be reworked to prize wellness over profits, or at least to align profits with wellness, rather than simply with treatments. The government is going to have to step in with a lot of money for the sort of comparative effectiveness research the private sector has been stubbornly unwilling to carry out on any large scale. Price signals are going to have to work much better, and that too will probably require regulation, like through some form of smart cost sharing. And there's much, much more. But patient knowledge, while nice, isn't anything near sufficient. Our relationshio with doctors is not like our relationship with the saleswoman at Best Buy. Our need for coronary bypass surgery is not like our desire for a Viking stove top. You will never create a health care marketplace in which consumers have enough power because health care is a unique marketplace that patients enter when they feel -- and often are -- utterly powerless. Hell, if Susan Sontag couldn't retain her rationality, what hope do the rest of us have?