Actually, there is a portion of the Obamacare bill that would become a pro-market reform (not of health care, but of health insurance) once it is shorn of the individual mandate and of the powers given the Secretary of HHS to micromange every detail of what a “qualifying plan” would be: the establishment of health insurance exchanges by each of the several states. I suspect that and the popular “slacker provision” that lets under 26ers stay on their parents plan would be about all that would survive.
The problem with a strict free-market reform of health care is that health care is, for reasons of quality control, actually provided by a government granted monopoly-guild: the physicians. Only licensed physicians can practice medicine — as it should be for reasons of quality control, but this means that prices for medical services, for which demand is quite inelastic, include a large share of monopoly rents. (Of course physicians suffer the predations of another state-created guild: the bar! Tort reform would go a good way toward containing medical costs.)
Most medical innovations are also sold by actual corporate monopolies, as they are patented. And, however much some FReepers may have bought into the delusion that a patent represents “property rights”, a patent is a state grant of a monopoly, period. (I regard the first modern patent law, the Statue of Monopolies of 1624 to have been the last good patent law, the plainly the one the Founders had in mind along with the Law of Queen Anne in granting Congress the power to grant copyrights and patents.)
I would be curious how you propose to create a free market in health care. Shall we abolish patents on medical advances? Let amateur physicians put out shingles? (Actually, I understand that in Iceland anyone can practice medicine so long as they market themselves as a “quack”, rather than a physician, or at least it used to be so.) Give tax breaks to anyone who will open a new med school? (Oh, wait, that’s government intervention, too. . .)
I am not as educated as you on this subject, so I won’t pretend to know more than I do. All I know is that, for example, in auto repair, I can go to any garage I choose, so the repair shops must compete for my business by keeping their prices competitive. If healthcare worked the same way, the prices for services would stay lower based on what people could afford to pay, and the whole industry would run at a lower cost structure, making it unattractive to government crooks looking to fill their coffers and shyster lawyers looking to dip into pockets of money. It’s a pipe dream, I know...