The article you posted proposes a bunch of minor modifications to a very broken system. The author recommends keeping Obamacare, and adjusting some aspects of how care is paid for. Anybody who thinks that is the solution is really just repeating what the hospitals, insurance companies, RINOS and Democrats, and drug companies want to hear.
More likely to be successful solutions to an obviously exploitative system rigged to benefit the providers will by necessity cause major dislocations in the business models of the current participants. How about thinking about real changes?
A lot of us are well informed about the nature of the health care markets, and as an example how the fake prices used by hospitals distort the market and analysis of health care costs. One simple, but radical solution would be to require hospitals to provide any service or product they sell at the same price to every customer, regardless of whether they were an individual cash payer, the government, or a private insurer. That would instantly change the entire market dynamic, as individuals would no longer need an insurance carrier to get them prices that are discounted 80 or 90 percent off the fake "list" prices. And the government could not underpay the hospitals for medicare and medicaid patients thereby forcing the actual costs of that service onto non government paid patients.
Anything that allows consumers (be they individuals or organizations) to more accurately understand the pricing of the medical services they are receiving is a good thing, as is anything that makes the nature of “cost shifting” more transparent.
This doesn’t address the underlying problem however: in a fee-for-service system the incentives are to maximize the services delivered, rather than optimize the cost/benefit ratio of the results achieved.
So while more transparent pricing and less cost shifting would certainly help to make the scale of the problem clearer, it doesn’t really get us much closer to reducing “the cost of healthcare” - just about everyone *already* knows that the current system is incredibly inefficient and wasteful - the problem is what to do about it.
“Do you have any support for your argument? Your statement that “no such system exists...or could” seems to have the kind of certainty often associated with bong based science. How do you know what “could” exist? Did you see it in your crystal ball?”
This is the problem with trying to discuss policy with libertarians, you are constantly in the position of “prove it’s impossible”.
This is the reason that “libertarians you will always have with you”.
Almost every other damn fool scheme for organizing society is at least practical enough to have been actually attempted, at least short-term:
Pure communism, brazen kleptocracy, organized theocracy, governance by ad hoc divine revelation, strong monarchy, various sorts of anarchism, “free love”, if humans can dream it up, it has been tried somewhere long enough to demonstrate it’s strengths and weaknesses.
Strong libertarianism however is so utterly impractical that its practitioners have never been able to sustain even a brief experimental attempted at scale to demonstrate its practicality.
It’s so impractical, it’s the only scheme that has never actually been tried!
And absent the attempt, libertarians will smugly ask (in the face of the pretty obvious answer) “prove that it’s impossible!”.