Here's a program for market-based healthcare reform: 1. Eliminate incentives for employer-based insurance. Give legal protection to insurance cooperatives, whe

Here's a program for market-based healthcare reform: 1. Eliminate incentives for employer-based insurance. Give legal protection to insurance cooperatives, where individual people could come together to buy insurance as a group. 2. Eliminate restrictions on buying insurance across state lines. This will take care of state-level regulations that drive costs up. 3. Eliminate artificial caps on the number of seats in medical schools, currently set by the AMA with government backing. 4. Loosen other requirements for medical licensure, like four years of undergraduate study in a totally unrelated program. Why are the people of America paying for Doctors' underwater basket-weaving courses? This and the previous point are a political minefield, so you can accomplish mostly the same by letting Nurses or Physicians Assistants to do most or all of a doctor's job. People can still choose to spend more on AMA-approved doctors, but it should be their own prerogative with their own money. 5. Institute an (at least initially) government-backed catastrophic insurance program for when people have ridiculous amounts of medical bills that they can't afford. This is probably what the market would have produced over the last century if not for government meddling. 6. High-deductible plans + health savings accounts are actually a pretty good idea. It puts people directly on the hook for their routine medical expenses, so they shop around and find lower prices. Milton Friedman wrote a great piece with some of these ideas in 2001: http://www.thepublicinterest.com/archives/2001winter/article1.html http://www.thepublicinterest.com/archives/2001winter/article...