I rather liked the system when I was in my 20's. I had major medical insurance. I took care of doctor visits and prescriptions and such and it took care of anything over $500. If that system were still the way of most medical insurance, the costs of doctor visits and prescriptions would not be so outlandish.

Insurance has ruined the health care industry in this country IMO. I didn't go to a doctor unless I had to. Now people go at the drop of a hat and my doctor wants me back every 4 months if I need him or not. That's wasteful.

I would be making a lot more progress in medical care discussions if people realized how this has changed, and why. The market was shoved out of the system a long time ago, and when the government started heavily regulating the insurance industry and providing its own "free" care for large sections of the population, prices started going up. I saw a graph of medical costs in America some years back in a "Consumer Reports." There was a definite upward "knee" in the curve at the same time Medicare was enacted. Why not? Somebody was going to pay up for a $5 aspirin.

If you bypass the consumers and simply pump cash directly into the provider, the market forces are short-circuited. Prices go up and, perversely, so does demand. This applies to any commodity, even critical ones.

The same thing has happened to college costs. The less people have to pay their own bills, the higher the prices go.

Ever get some body work done on a car? I don't know how legal it is, but it was not uncommon for me to get a "cash" price and an "insurance" price for comparison. Guess which one was less.

You could go to a veterinarian and get some pretty heavy work done for a few hundred dollars. The quality of veterinary provider education, materials, and everything else are not measurably less than for human medicine (ask a vet). Until recently, there really wasn't "pet insurance," and government doesn't have "Peticare." You pretty much got a market price.