It's good to finally see our elected government officials FINALLY start doing their jobs, it seems in the last few months they've finally been pushed far enough from the right to actually stand up and do something about it.

Medicine and Capitalism DO NOT MIX. How hard is this for people to understand? Capitalism is great, except when human health and well being are involved. Health care should never be a "for profit" system at all.

Call me extremist, socialist, whatever. Pure capitalism fails for the exact same reason Pure communism fails - Human Greed.

@kagenin, I actually disagree. I don't think there's any problem with using markets in medicine -- in fact I think it's preferrable -- the problem is that you need to make sure the market dynamics lead to a cycle of providing better care to more people, and not a cycle of providing more expensive care to fewer people.

For example, the system Anthony Weiner wants is single-payer. All that really does is say that for certain basic types of medical service, there's a single state-based insurance company that covers everyone, and will use a nation-sized customer pool to negotiate set rates common to all providers.

The providers themselves are private, and they profits by attracting more patients with good service, and by driving cost efficiencies. In other words, they get rich by taking better care of people and by eliminating waste.

The problem in our system is that the incentives are all wrong.

The private insurance companies make a profit by only extending insurance to people who're as healthy as possible. Their goal is to collect premiums with the lowest amount of "medical loss" -- in other words, without having to actually cover the cost of any treatment. That leads them to cover fewer people, jack up the rates of people who are older or chronically ill, fight with patients over every expensive claim, and try to rescind coverage retroactively on their sickest customers.

The providers also have bad incentives. They make all their money by performing procedures, and getting reimbursed by the insurance companies. This leading them to have tremendous incentives to give everyone a CAT scan and MRI if they come in with stubbed toe. So, they're always working on new, expensive tests and treatments, and reasons to use them on as many patients as possible, without much regard to efficiency or patient benefit.

There are lots of ways to break us out of those bad incentives. On paper, HSA's might work to reduce costs if that was the only way anyone could pay for medical service. If you eliminate traditional insurance entirely, add in mandatory contributions to HSA's, and a little bit of subsidy to cover people who need to spend more than they can afford, and I might be willing to support it.

But just having HSA's as part of our existing mix has essentially no effect on the system at all. Participation is way too low for it to make any difference at all.