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Comment by glennvtx | Hacker News Reader

No we do not. The government has screwed the system up enough, giving this government even more control is a terrible idea. Just stop enforcing monopolies, Force providers to have a clear pricing structure and let market forces deal with it.

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From my Non-American view, this is a classic case for the need of regulation. The government define a set of medical treatments that were scientifically proved, don't allow the insurance companies to deny the request of medical treatments from the doctor.

The only problems we face is some malicious doctors requests unnecessary treatments, or malicious doctor and patient working together to request the money for treatments that didn't happen. But these are trivial fraud techniques and it happens anyway regardless of context so it can be dealt with usual criminal law system.

The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) included mandatory insurance funding for homeopathy, chiropractors, acupuncture, and naturopaths. My wife worked at a chiropractors office who got paid by Medicare to shock elderly diabetics legs while they chowed down on candy bars. Homeopathy is one of the dumbest scams known to man, and I don’t really know about the other two but I wouldn’t call them “medicine”. The more government there is around to fund things, the more dumb bloat there is and we’ll get more glorified massage therapists cutting children’s “tongue ties” and selling amber teething necklaces for $40. Let people waste their own money on this stuff.

The market forces did deal with it and created entities large enough to perform regulatory capture and here we are.

The government created these entities by giving the insurance companies a priveliged position in their regulatory structure starting in WW2, and increasing this with every promised legislative "fix" including the creation of the HMO in the 70's with the HMO Act of 1973, all the way through Obamacare, which was considered to be the best thing since Sliced Bread, right up until "We can't handle any of this Capitalism shit, we need Single Payer!"

Not everything magically works well under free market forces. Two examples are healthcare and prison management.

Because you incentivize either people being sick, or in prison. It's really as simple as that.

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