Jeff Jacoby believes that free-market forces, as in the case of Lasik eye surgery, can effectively enable patients (i.e., consumers) to keep health care costs down (“A free market will help fix health care,” Op-ed, Nov. 28). However, two examples support Paul Krugman’s argument that health care can’t simply “be marketed like bread or TVs.”
First, Lasik surgery, a single procedure, can readily be evaluated by the consumer and immediately provides data to the free market. A bad result, and consumers will choose another seller. A diagnostic procedure, such as evaluation of nerve and muscle disorders, produces no immediate “result”; the diagnostic result leads to a series of other choices (course of treatment, facility, provider, etc.), all of which make it virtually impossible to accurately evaluate the diagnostic procedure’s marketability and thus adjust prices. The data are too complex and may take years to develop.
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Complex factors make a free market for health care hard to navigate" Complex factors make government run, single payer healthcare IMPOSSIBLE to navigate. And it's PLANNED to be that way. That way the government can ask YOU to pony up more money for the government to fix problems that it created, and to create new problems that will require MORE government to fix (But of course).