Reddit reviews Patient Power: Solving America's Health Care Crisis

A1:

I believe this is correct, but the part that complicates this matter is interstate commerce. There is a difference between a state dictating its regulations regarding health insurance companies and entirely preventing individual citizens from being a customer of an out-of-state insurance company that does not have the same regulations. The way I see it, it's the difference between being forced to work in the state in which you live and having the opportunity to, say, live in New Jersey and work in NYC.

A2:

Insurance companies would flock to states with the least amount of regulation, but that doesn't mean that only the lowest-covered plans with the lowest prices will be bought. It depends on what people want.

Let's say there's a state with no insurance regulations. Now, a company can offer a plan that includes pregnancy services, or it can offer a plan that does not include pregnancy services, based on the age and sex of the consumer. Obviously, the former would be more expensive, but it is up to the consumer to decide.

The issue is if you have regulations that dictate that every insurance company and plan must offer pregnancy services, that's an unnecessary cost to a husband and wife in their 50s.

B/C:

Yes, it would be very unpopular to offer a service for free to a specific group while forcing all others to pay for it, and then right the ship by having individuals be responsible for their own payments in order to increase efficiency and lower overall cost.

Regarding Canada, yes, it has "free" health care, but in socialized industries, either costs are high due to inefficiency or shortages are inevitable. So, when you see that costs are lower per capita in socialized health systems such as the one in Canada, there also exist absurd wait times because of said shortage. The average wait time in Canada is 47 weeks for neurosurgery, 38 weeks for orthopaedic surgery, 28.5 weeks for eye surgery, and 26 weeks for plastic surgery. The shortest wait time for a specialist is that for oncological services, and even that is a full month - quite a period when every treatment counts in the fight against cancer. (Source: http://www.ctvnews.ca/health/healthcare-wait-times-hit-20-weeks-in-2016-report-1.3171718)

In addition to long wait times, health care shortages manifest as a shortage of capital and health care equipment. The US has at best a mockery of a market health care system. Yet, in 1992, compared per capita to Canada, we had 8x more MRI machines (Washington state had more MRI machines than all of Canada), 7x more radiation therapy units for cancer treatment, 6x more lithotripsy units, and 3x more open-heart surgery units (Source: Patient Power, by John Goodman and Gerald Musgrave). We've become more centrally planned since then regarding health care, yet still have 5x more MRI machines and 3x more CT scanners per capita (Source: http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba649).

Think about the fact that despite Canadians' "free" access to care, people are still choosing to go to another country to pay for medical services that would be free in their own country.
We all want lower costs, but the way to lower them is not to deny care for those who either legitimately need or are willing to pay for it. It is to decrease overconsumption on others' dime and increase supply and competition.

Of course, part of increasing supply includes increasing the number of doctors, but so long as the United States places caps on the number of residency positions available for medical school graduates, there won't be a significant increase in the supply of PCPs and specialists, at least for the near future.