[ardy42]

> Elimination of the price mechanism eliminates a key way to sort out who truly needs healthcare (or whatever service). Consider a safe elective knee surgery. If you knew it was paid for by the government, you would just sign yourself up for the surgery for even the slightest ache. If there was a copay, you might reconsider unless your pain was actually painful enough to warrant it.

Huh? Surgeries don't work like that, they all have significant risks of giving you worse problems than you already have. And even if successful, they're not going to leave you "good as new" or anything like that.

Also, the price mechanism doesn't actually do anything to sort out who "truly needs healthcare," all it does it make it so the wealthy can get whatever they want and the poor can't even get what they need. The actual mechanism for preventing unnecessarily and wasteful medical care is the professional ethics of doctors and the caution of patients.