Is health care a right?

[Harlan Huckleby]

What if our employers bought our grocery insurance for us, and we would just go to the store, fill up our carts, not look at the bill, and then submit the receipt to our employer provided grocery insurer.

Stop.

Pigging-out on steaks and Hagan Daas is quite different from getting annual flu shots, or getting a prostate exam, or getting stitches for a wound. (All services that people without health insurance often forgo because of cost.)

We're trying to have a serious conversation. The notion that people are eager to devote hours to sit in hospital waiting rooms to pig-out on services they don't really need is absurd.

What would happen to the price of a gallon of milk after three years of this? What if millions of people did not care what groceries cost? .

Even in your silly example, you ignore that there are still cost control forces at play. The employer's insurance cost is going to depend on the cost of the services. The end consumers don't care about price, but there are larger players who very much care.

you ignore realities that conflict with your theory in the case of healthcare, your hypothetical is just more of the same.

So then, what if after milk became twenty dollars a gallon, a few people wanted to start a little market to "introduce market forces?" It wouldn't matter. All the wholesalers would be charging heavily inflated prices because the majority of the industry would support that.

You have created an entire industry that supports heavily inflated prices. They must pay those prices, but they "support" them because ... I guess I missed that part. This is a very strange conspiracy, and very strange view of economics.

You need to introduce market forces everywhere, if you are going to introduce them anywhere.

You have addressed none of the problems of a free market in the case of health care, I guess you don't want to think about it too much. You are speaking in pure dogma.