[bawana]

The whole premise of 'for-profit' healthcare stinks to high heaven. Regardless of hospitals calling themselves 'non-profit', they behave like profit seeking enterprises. This is the ultimate corporate double speak.

The bottom line is that - people do not get to choose their illness. So a capitalist model in Adam Smith's sense where people get to 'choose' their 'insurance' based on price and benefit is an illusion. It would be like having identical futures contracts on a commodity from different brokers with the only difference being the commission structure. The underlying product is the same and in fact regulated by law.

Legally, are non profits allowed to do mergers and acquisitions ?The hospitals are becoming monolithic monopolies.

[boxed]

There's a third option though: the state is the customer, not the individual. Then private healthcare can work. Insurance companies sort of try to emulate that, but it doesn't really work.

[akramachamarei]

What do you mean by the state is the customer? As in they act as a buyer of healthcare for taxpayers? Why would we expect that to be better?

[boxed]

Yea. I expect it to be better because we have this in Sweden and it's vastly better than the US' system :P But there are many other things that are different of course, so hard to know which is which.