Have you noticed the new trend among regressives regarding healthcare? Having lied for decades that America has the "best healthcare system" in the world, they have now begun a new lie - that the American system is not "really" a free-market system and that if only we had a free-market system and it was allowed to work, things would become oh-so-wonderful.
As if the unfettered capitalism that is the US health insurance system, was not really "allowed" to work for the benefit of the people! By who? By the government, of course!
Which is why when an anti-Obamacare friend forwarded me yet another Forbes article on free-market healthcare and how Singapore has it while the US doesn't, I wrote the following response...
And this from a bunch of folks who have been shouting from the rooftops that the US has the "best" healthcare system in the world! What was Forbes saying 10, 20 years ago when more and more millions of Americans joined the ranks of the uninsured and when hundreds of thousands of Americans filed for bankruptcy due to astronomical medical costs? Absolutely nothing!
And now they come around saying this is not "really" a free market system?! The idea that there is some wonderful capitalist solution just waiting to be discovered, is ludicrous. An unfettered capitalist system is what we have had and that is what these guys have championed all along.
If you look at Singapore's system, it is not an outlier. Every country's system is slightly different as it is tuned to the circumstances and the needs of its people. It is the US that is an outlier, as the only developed country that does not provide universal healthcare.
The American "system" that Forbes and company proclaimed to be the best in the world (a "system" that left 40+ million with no coverage) was tried by Switzerland - which was a capitalist country the last time I checked! The Swiss found it unworkable and abandoned it in favor of a system that more closely resembles the German system.
Look at the Frontline program - "Five capitalist countries and how they do it" - http://www.pbs.org/... for details.
The comments of the Taiwanese official who was part of the team that devised a healthcare system for Taiwan in the last decade (in the end, they chose a system modeled on Canada's Medicare) are very instructive - "Well, American is not really a system that you can copy. It's a market. So if you let things happen, it will be like the United States... in the end we said, 'No, this is not the way we want to go.' " - http://www.pbs.org/...
If you want to figure out solutions for healthcare, listen to people who live and breathe in the field. Like Dr. Uwe Reinhardt - http://en.wikipedia.org/... and Dr. Atul Gawande - http://en.wikipedia.org/... Not to people like Forbes who kept applauding a system even as it threw millions of their countrymen under the bus!