I'd like to argue with the folks who think the free market has a place in medicine. As Tim rightly points out, competition is an essential component of free markets. The other fundamental characteristics are equal access to the same information by all (which is why insider trading is banned), and equal choice among all the competitive alternatives, i.e. they must all be equally available. Competition is the only aspect that could be introduced, but even that would lead to a loss of efficiency in some situations. You will not be shopping around for the best O2 cylinder when you're dying of suffocation. As for informed decisions and equal access, those are impossible. The only people who could exercise them are doctors and hospitals. However, they don't *necessarily* have the patient's best interests at heart. (The fact that they very often do, says that people aren't as bad as it sometimes seems.) Only the patient *always* has their own best interests at heart, and there is no way most patients can have enough information to make an informed decision. And there is no way any patient, even one with an MD, can calmly weigh all possible alternatives while in pain or dying. Those are the fundamental reasons why free market medical care can't work. Then there's an immense slew of practical reasons as well, sprinkled liberally throughout this blog, the news, the US health care system, the Third World, and on and on and on. I'm on this big rant because I see the misplaced application of free markets literally ruining our society and our planet. This is huge. It's not just medical care. Free markets work for what can be bought or sold. They don't work for beauty, love, truth, sex, justice, knowledge, the environment, or, for that matter, care of the sick and dying. They're great at what they do, but if we don't learn to limit them to that, and damn soon, too, we won't have anything left to buy or sell.