[dragonwriter]

> How is this surprising? We've completely taken the free-market out of health care. The only way it will ever be solve is if we re-introduce market forces back into the mix.

The theory of free market efficiency is based on low-entry-barrier wide-open competition, and perfect advance knowledge of costs and realized utilities by both buyers and sellers. There's lots of goods and services for which this is close enough to reality for the theory to mostly hold, but there's not much reason to think that healthcare is among them (and comparative quality and cost measures among real world healthcare systems don't support the idea that its a market where more "market forces" equals more efficiency.)