I think you misunderstood me when I said:

What else would you expect when you give a business the power to control how much product and service it will deliver for a given price?

Judging by your reaction:

Sure. Why should the provider of a product or service have anything to say about what price they can charge? Especially when some ignorant boob in Washingon DC, who has never come within fifty miles of a real business enviroment, can pull some arbitrary price out of his ass that he thinks will endear him to the maximum number of voters?

The formula is important to what I meant, and you seem to have it exactly backward. Forward: Given the customer's advance commitment to pay a fixed price, in the form of premiums, an HMO gets to unilaterally choose what it delivers. The customer agrees to purchase something called "health care", and the HMO gets to define what that means.

How would you like to commit to purchasing "a car", and, depending on the manufacturer's and dealer's profit at the moment, what you get is whatever the hell they want to give you?

In any industry other than "health care", that way of doing business would be considered fraud. In "health care" it's euphemistically called "managed care". It's nowhere to be found in any free-market theory I've ever heard of, and maybe that's why it's not surprising that it produces pathological results.

You're being a bit cryptic with "For a good time, look up who invented HMOs in 1973." The HMO Act of 1973 established the industry, and was signed by Nixon. But the name is older, and the concept even older: Mayo Clinic in the 19th Century, Kaiser's Permanente in the 1950s, etc. What?