> The government is indeed subject to the law, much more stringently than insurance companies in fact. Try doing something nominally illegal in a government age

> The government is indeed subject to the law, much more stringently than insurance companies in fact. Try doing something nominally illegal in a government agency. You're talking about rules for employees. I'm talking about interaction with clients. When the DMV says "no", you're basically hosed. > Well, I'll tell you one thing, Medicare doesn't spend the 20 million to deny 21 million dollars in claims like I outlined above. Actually, it does. More to the point, the rules are such that it doesn't have to spend much money to deny and there's almost nothing that you can do about it. > We should make switching insurance companies easier, but that doesn't get us anywhere if they're all embracing the same bad practices. Competition results in better customer service in every other industry, why is health insurance different? > I don't have the option of starting an insurance company out of my garage like you could with a tech startup Actually, you do. All it takes is some money and a decent risk model, and you can bootstrap by providing services to companies that self-insure, which significantly reduces the money required. > That's the tradeoff.. as far as which is more effective, we could look at every other industrialized country which gets better outcomes for a fraction of the cost Not on comparable populations.