musicheck

"I think the Austrian business-cycle theory has done the world a great deal of harm. If you go back to the 1930s, which is a key point, here you had the Austrians sitting in London, Hayek and Lionel Robbins, and saying you just have to let the bottom drop out of the world. You’ve just got to let it cure itself. You can’t do anything about it. You will only make it worse. You have Rothbard saying it was a great mistake not to let the whole banking system collapse. I think by encouraging that kind of do-nothing policy both in Britain and in the United States, they did harm."- Milton Friedman, cautioning against the dangers of a Ron Paul type of monetary policy.

A big economic literature on adverse selection in health insurance questions your belief. While the price mechanism is great for regular care, I worry that when only the sick choose to get insurance for catastrophic care, the result is high cost insurance, and the whole market unravels.

A successful example of a mix of a free market and subsidies is the Singapore system, which has great outcomes at a lower cost than the Western European systems. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Singapore

Support for a 100% free market in health makes me think twice about voting for you, as much as I admire libertarian principles.

If you could design the American healthcare system, how much role for government would you have? Would there be transfers or subsidies as well as a free market?