Jim Henderson wrote:
> "Let the market decide" - the problem (as I see it) with this is that 
> some things *shouldn't* be driven by the market (ie, money).  Health is 
> one of those. 

There are two problems with private health insurance (or, indeed, voluntary 
health insurance).

1 - If it's voluntary, only the sick people sign up for it. The insurance 
nature suffers therefrom, especially if those who didn't pay for it get 
treated anyway, which they do. That's why private individual insurance in 
the USA is so much more expensive than company-paid insurance - when it's a 
company plan, even the healthy employees pay in.

2 - Your health is worth virtually anything you own. How much of your 
personal wealth would you spend to cure your cancer? This throws a 
monkey-wrench into all sorts of shopping-around capitalism scenarios, in 
much the same way that having a program you need that only runs on Windows 
makes shopping around for other operating systems moot. The "utility value" 
of not dying outweighs almost everything else for most people. Plus, by 
eliminating coverage for pre-existing[1] conditions, you pretty much 
guarantee that shopping around for coverage makes no sense - if you know 
what your insurance needs to cover, the private insurance company won't 
cover it.

[1] And what's wrong with "existing condition"? Doesn't every existing 
condition "pre-exist" the present?

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "We'd like you to back-port all the changes in 2.0
    back to version 1.0."
   "We've done that already. We call it 2.0."

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