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The free market has incredible power to find the most cost efficient solution to any problem. This is wonderful if you're talking about making a profit off selling cars for instance, but falls apart completely when talking about something like health care.

To understand the issue, you must ask yourself, what is health care, a consumer good, to be bought and traded like computers or cars? Or a public good, such as clean drinking water, electricity and roads? I would say that it is a public good, something everyone should have access to, regardless of their financial position. In this case, the free market is not the optimal solution.

It goes back to the point of the market, making money. That's quite different from delivering a quality product. People will claim "well, if someone isn't providing good healthcare, people will stop going to them, the market works." And that may well be true. How many people suffer from poor treatment, or too expensive treatment or no treatment before the market, corrects itself? Is a system where everyone has access to medical treatment actually the most "cost effective" system? In fact, it is not. Much like it is much more cost effective to let people in the third world starve than it is to ship them food, it is much easier to price health-care such that only a percentage of people can have access to it. It is here that a problem arises.

The United States is not a free market economy. In most essential products, things like water, food, electricity and the like, there are market controls set up by the government to ensure that the most amount of people have access to these goods. Farm subsidies ensure the price of food remains relatively stable. Government sponsored monopolies on water ensure that the economy of scale comes to bear and keep water prices low. So too for electricity. Health care should be no different because it is no less essential to living in a the modern world.

Be deregulating the market and allowing no price controls, you're entirely likely to make life saving treatments only available to those with the ability to pay. I cannot believe that the United States, as a society, could live with telling something they can't be treated for a curable cancer because they're not wealthy enough to afford the procedure.

Learn more about this author, Bryan Jennings.
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