what the market wants to do

Very rarely do I read an article on health care reform and think that an author actually gets it. Not like I have any answers, but almost every solution I see thrown out, by left and right alike, just seem like disasters waiting to happen, ya know, sorta like the current health care system. So Kudos to Tim Noah, who ends his article on a brilliant note:

The overall trend—the gift of an increasingly market-driven health-care system—is to undermine the very idea that the cost of illness should be spread out among the general population, healthy and unhealthy alike. In this sense, the market is too efficient. Assigning health care costs to sick people is what the market wants to do.

Markets can do many wonderful things, which is why I'm glad to live in a capitalist country. But they've made a complete hash of the health-care system. Doesn't that reality deserve more than passing respect?

In the rest of the article, Noah reviews Jonathan Cohn's to-be-soon-published history of health care disasters, Sick: The Untold Story of America's Health Care Crisis—And the People Who Paid the Price. Going straight to the top of the Wishlist.