Our current health care system is far from a "free market". It is heavily regulated, absurdly subsidized, and has all sorts of laws preventing anything that looks like a market. There are minor attempts to retain some market elements, but what we have largely done is create a hybrid monstrosity that combines the worst of public and private.

The fundamental problem with health care is simple: As our technology increases, the number of things we can POSSIBLY do to save a life or improve someone's health increases...and it is doing so far faster than the economy grows. Therefore, it is inevitable that either health care will continue to consume a larger portion of the GDP, or at some point, we will acknowledge that we can't do the best for everyone all the time. This is true regardless of the funding mechanism.

80 years ago, if you got cancer, your treatment was some morphine and a few "best wishes" for your trip to heaven or hell. Now we can spend hundreds of thousands, even millions, fighting the disease. The difference will only growth with time.

>>80 years ago, if you got cancer, your treatment was some morphine and a few "best wishes" for your trip to heaven or hell. Now we can spend hundreds of thousands, even millions, fighting the disease. The difference will only growth with time.<<

I have been thinking along these lines as well when getting down to the root cause of our health care system. My plan would work like the insurance payouts made to the people that died because of 911. Here the insurance adjuster calculated what each life was worth, by determining their expected revenue generation, and using this to make the settlement. I would do the same for determining the cost for every drug and vaccine. For example, if you’re 80 years old suffering from cancer and aren't generating any income and most of your value is helping your family the cost for your drugs would be very cheap. If you are an adolescent and an aids vaccine becomes available that will cost your family top dollar. In other words we start paying for what the medication is actually worth in terms of life extension and quality of life rather the length of time Pharma took to develop the treatment. This would cause research companies to stop bring drugs to market with the expectation of taking a stage 4 cancer victim and extending their life three months and encourage them to do research on childhood vaccines and curative treatments over drugs that must be taken daily to mitigate symptoms or extend the lives of people whose quality of life is already considerable diminished.