I made that number up, but it could realistically be true. Here is what I would like to see in health care (and sadly, it's against the law).

For some reason many years ago, a law came into effect that said if you have the training to save someone life, and you chose not to, you are criminally responsible for there death. I have no idea why that's a law. I mean it sounds nice and all, but where does that hold any standing constitutionally? if we could get rid of that law, we could do the following:

Open a private hospital. If you are not a member of my hospital, you don't get treatment. Period. This hospital also does not take insurance, and all treatment in this hospital is free. How do they make money? Subscriptions. In order to get treatment at this private hospital, you have to be a member. As a member, you have a monthly fee. Fee's are based on demographic information. You can charge woman more then men, the old more then the young, a smoker more then a non smoker. The only thing you are legally required to do offer membership to everyone. You can not discriminate.

What does this do? It has now made private hospitals competitive with one another. They must keep the service high, and the cost low, or you will go to the next hospital over, and become a member there. They now must compete for your business.

This is very similar to elective surgery, like plastic surgery and eye surgery. I can get top of the line Lasik done for $700 an eye. If this was done under insurance, it would probably cost $7,000, and not be done as well. Medical treatment does not have to cost a lot, it just does because of two factors.

1. They don't have to compete.

2. They must treat everyone. The only way to pay for the people who are not covered, is to charge the people who are more. This raises the cost of health insurance, and thus less people have it. It's a vicious circle.

With this system, I can see a monthly fee being $30-$40 a month for a 20 year old man, and $100-$200 for an elderly one. Both cases are far less then it is today. 

This could also be subsidized by the Government if you wish to cover the poor. I personally think this would put healthcare at a level where anyone can afford it, but even if you did want to subsidize it, it would still be the best solution. Far better then Government run healthcare.

Sounds like a sci-fi movie in an alternate universe in which everybody lives on an island of less than 100,000 rich people and Ayn Rand and Adam Smith make all the babies and laws.

How many doctors, beds, and dollars does one of these hospitals need to get started up?

Interesting how you find it so far fetched, when it's really just like government run healthcare, only with accountability. You would in effect have 100's of micro instances competing against one another, so waste and abuse would be kept to a minimum (unlike every government run entity today).

As for how many resources you need, it depends on how many members you have. The up side to this idea, is you can calculate that, as you know how many sick people you have to worry about. If you have 3000 members, you only need to worry about 3000 people. Not 3000 + anyone who walks in off the street wanting unpaid services.

It's just that I think letting people die is a bad thing that we can easily avoid.


I think pure free markets are experiments that should be run on small scales and not on the federal level, the same way I feel about communes vs. communism.


Maybe the government or one deranged billionaire can finance one of these as an experiment and fund it until it can sustain itself, and then see if it can grow and spread everywhere?

I am sorry and I don´t intend to insult you but this is the most moronic idea I have ever seen in writting and it has to be worse then the worthless system you employ now.

What you need to do is to take a look at Swedish healt care system and copy it, it works great and it´s benefitial for the people and makes it cheap for all citisens.

America would just have to look at the health care systems in almost any other developed country in the world, copy it, and it would be an improvement.

Lets say you need emergency care and you are 5 minutes from a 'subscription only" hospital and 15 minutes from a normal hospital. You cant go to the subscription hospital and you dont get the nomral hospital in time and you die.  That is unethical from a medical standpoint, that is inefficient to a healthcare standpoint, that is inefficient to an economic standpoint, and it is also illegal.

I haven't looked for statistics recently, but a couple years ago I saw that 80% of all illnesses were considered "Preventable" and they accounted for (roughly) 90% of healtcare costs ... Now, I could be wrong but I suspect that healthcare actually matches the old cliche of "A dime of prevention is worth a dollar of cure"

The problem is how do you convince people to live a healthier lifestyle?

Perhaps then for his system, there could be emergency transfer releases so that any hospital could care for you in the emergency.  Some kind've write offs and exchanges between hospitals for the emergencies with a hospital owing for the associated costs.

The idea itself seems a little far fetched though.

Thats true, preventative medicine is the best and cheapest way to treat patients.

For people who are uninsured, they dont get preventative medicine because they cant afford it.  They dont do regular check ups so they dont know about a problem until its already presented itself, they they go to the hospital which has to treat them.  Insuring more people is the only way to go about this, no matter if your answer is free market or government regulation.

As for people who are insured but dont use check ups effectively and miss out on preventative treatment, there isn't a good answer to that.  I guess we could scare them into going to the doctor with ads.