[mchusma]

Nothing is free. We want both low cost and high quality healthcare.

This means we need to have ways in incentivize innovation (AI diagnostics, robotic procedures, drug discovery, deeper R&D).

Free Markets (with government controls against monopoly) are generally better than governments at delivering cost and quality improvements, but healthcare in most countries is somewhere between “100% not a market” and “70% not a market” (the US). In many cases, governments also actively create and enforce monopolies (eg AMA or local hospitals in the US).

There are a million other things but part of what is required for markets to work is skin in the game, which the UK, Canada, and the US all do bad jobs of in their own ways.

Some say medicine has no elasticity. I don’t think that is true for 90% of spend (for gunshot wounds, maybe, but most spending is on chronic diseases where multiple providers and approaches are available and people could price shop).

I would like to see more countries experiment with more free market healthcare. It’s remarkably effective for many pieces of healthcare.