Health Care and Profits, a Poor Mix - The New York Times
Healthcare is not like any other good. It intrinsically suffers from every impediment to ‘free’ markets imaginable. You are compelled by circumstances to purchase it, and thus cannot navigate the ‘marketplace’ with the critical option of simply not purchasing. You suffer vast information asymmetries related to the skills of the provider, error rate of diagnosis, quality of care, likelihood of success, and therapeutic alternatives. You select from providers and therapies that are sufficiently heterogeneous to make meaningful comparison impossible. You pay for treatment so you get more treatment, not more health. And you rely on third-parties whose vested interests simply could not be more different from your own, and who (by virtue of the structural flaws above) have an enormous space in which to operate unchecked in rent-seeking ways.
To say that a ‘market’ for healthcare is sub-optimal, from a social and economic point of view, should by now be tautological. A marketplace isn’t the “least worst” way of provisioning healthcare. It is rather quite simply the worst.