"Let the consumer decide, not the government."
The government has a role in freeing up the healthcare market, making sure it is free of collusion and big firms bullying smaller firms out of the market, and in ensuring the poor have access to adequate health care.
Currently, health care is deeply corrupt in the west, with too few companies controlling the market and with governments only exacerbating the situation by providing market protection for these firms.
The end result is high prices and poor products leading to poor health outcomes.
What needs to happen is opening the health care market up to competition by leveling the playing field with the government getting out of the business of picking winners and losers. That is for consumers to decide as they do in other markets, and is based around branding.
Good products and manufacturers will do well as their brand succeeds in the marketplace, while poor and overpriced products and their providers will disappear.
The level playing field needs to apply to all types of medicine, including natural and traditional products, alongside modern chemical derivations, which are currently heavily promoted (and government subsidized) for profit reasons rather than any inherent superiority.
This neutral role of government means no one type of medicine should be subsidized by governments above others, although insurance firms can design whatever policies they prefer, the success of which will be up to consumers to decide.
True competition will ensure only effective, popular products survive and less popular, over-priced ones do not.
Unlike the elitists and those with a naive faith in government, I would prefer to see millions of decision makers, rather than a small handful of government agents, free to make their own healthcare choices.
After all, only the individual knows what is right for them, and to claim a stranger subject to corrupting influences is a better judge seems downright dangerous to me!
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