The Crushing Cost of Health Care

Yeah that's the scary thing. The actual cost is much higher. How much of this is inefficiency/"overcharging" is up for debate but it's pretty clear that since the bulk of the cost of healthcare for most people is paid by someone else, there's no incentive to economize.

Plus modern medicine is AMAZING, but the surrounding economy isn't strong enough to support it. People simply aren't productive enough to pay for the cost of the most advanced treatments.

Have you got a link to a source for that? I'd be interested in seeing the precise figures.

Yes, I learned this from a talk at the University of Chicago Hospitals -- Medicare/Medicaid almost always paid less than a dollar for every dollar in costs that they incurred (I think the quoted average number was closer to 50 cents on the dollar but I could be wrong). The only way they made up for these costs was from patients with certain types of private health insurance (not all types because some like Blue Cross had essentially negotiated rates very very close to cost). Without these patients, the hospital would not have been able to afford the Medicare and Medicaid patients.

How does that work once more and more people are on medicare (baby boomers) and medicaid (larger absolute numbers and probably percentages of poor people in a failing economy, and possibly if there's a "public option" for healthcare in a few years)?

Presumably both medicare and medicaid are highly localized user communities, too -- I suspect very few people in Aspen use either, even if eligible for medicare.

More importantly, it ignores the fact that this already happens, except it's insurance companies, not a government agency, that do it.

"Life is not fair, and saving for terrible contingencies helps mitigate those very risks."

For many hard-working people, it's impossible to save enough, or to have saved enough, for such contingencies. The simplest example would be a young couple whose child has some wildly expensive condition.