[speedplane]

I like your comparison to LASIK and cosmetic surgery, which I agree are functioning markets. But I'm not sure I agree with the rest.

There are two components to healthcare funding: (1) insurance which protects from the serious unforeseen health expenditures; and (2) healthcare, which includes routine health checkups, preventative care, and also, the very common ailments as one gets older. The two are somewhat inter-related (if you're generally unhealthy, you're more likely to have serious ailments), but makes sense to separate the two as separate products.

Even for relatively wealthy people, it's difficult to afford serious medical care out-of-pocket (it can cost >$20k/day in the hospital). So that's one product people can buy, with its own deductibles.

However, routine medical care that everyone needs no matter what is a different product, and the cost of that product could be more closely tied to the value of the services received.

Separating these two products may bring about more competition in each, and perhaps more efficiencies.

[smallnamespace]

One large problem with making preventative care a separate market is that people who are too poor to get preventative care and get sick usually end up in an ER, where the rest of society ends up footing the bill.

And a sick person in the ER can easily cost tens to hundreds of times as much as the preventative care would have been in the first place.

So making preventative care mandatory actually saves everyone a lot of money in the long run -- even if the preventative care is run extremely inefficiently and poorly, it would still be cheaper than what we have now, which is socialized medicine that only kicks in after people get incredibly sick and expensive to treat.