There's a lot of evidence that the early the transition is made the happier the patient will be. I think you are right on the mark about "growing up the wrong gender" playing a role. Typically adult transitions come with all sorts of co-morbid conditions probably resulting from years of denial, rejection, and often abuse.

My point is that, if you are mad at apple, you should be angry at whoever you purchased your PC from. Whatever you are typing on was assembled in the same conditions, probably worse, because of the lower profit margins and lower public scrutiny.

By bringing down prices. Insurance is for catastrophic needs, not standard care. If you remove standard care from the picture and boil 'insurance' down to catastrophic needs then it becomes easily affordable by anyone except for the most extreme, hard-luck, down-and-out exceptions. The needs of that tiny percentage can be handled easily without a massive, national, one-size-fits-all monstrosity. Such needs can be managed entirely with private charities, community care, or state/municipal programs.

The costs for standard care will rapidly decrease to proper market levels once the mentality of 'insurance covered' is removed. People will pay for what they need and negotiate directly with providers. Costs will lower to what the market can support - not what 'corporations' dictate. It happens every time like clockwork.

You express remarkable faith in the free market there. How are you so sure what would happen if we let the market have free reign? The economy is a highly complex system, and even professional economists have difficulty understanding it. But some guy from the internet really knows how it all works then? I for one am not willing to gamble with people's lives and health on the basis of unproven free market theory.

you seem to be embracing the "moral hazard" theory of health insurance, according to which health care costs are driven up because people with insurance purchase more health care than they otherwise would have. This theory is not universally accepted in the economics profession.

“Moral hazard is overblown,” the Princeton economist Uwe Reinhardt says. “You always hear that the demand for health care is unlimited. This is just not true. People who are very well insured, who are very rich, do you see them check into the hospital because it’s free? Do people really like to go to the doctor? Do they check into the hospital instead of playing golf?”


I recommend reading this: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/08/29/050829fa_fact

Yes - but the equation has been altered by a government mandated series of insurance programs that meddle with the marketplace. HMOs only exist because of government edict. Insurance programs then had to start covering "standard" health care instead of just catastrophic care. In order to make that possible, they had to start developing new programs & rate systems that were financially (A) feasible and (B) profitable. Other GOVERNMENT laws prevented competition across state lines, and a bunch of other crap that turned 'insurance' into a hodgepodge of arcane, impenetrable 'covers everything' baloney as opposed to a simple "catastrophic care" transaction.

Um, at no point did you explain here how the market would help people with pre-existing conditions. Probably because it wouldn't. I'll grant you that our current system is probably less efficient than a free market one would be. However it doesn't follow from that that the free market is the solution to everything.

The point is that with freedom, almost everyone will be able to afford catastrophic care - and the needs of the remainder will be well within the grasp of private, municipal, & state means.

You mean you personally think that everyone will be able to afford catastrophic care, but you don't know. My point is that the freedom for rich people to buy yachts is not as important as people's basic health and well-being. So lets tax the yachts and make sure that everyone's needs are taken care of, like they should be in any civilized society.