There exists a Free Market Medical Association.
Some quotes from the website:
.... innovation in healthcare can only happen when a buyer and a seller are able to business transparently and fairly.
The free market movement in healthcare is gaining steam. ...
Matching a willing buyer with a willing seller of valuable healthcare services is the goal of everyone involved in this movement. We help identify patients willing to pay cash, doctors willing to list their prices, businesses attempting to provide affordable quality insurance, and providers/services/and patient advocates that are helping make everything work.
The Free Market works when there is freedom of choice:
Willing buyer
Willing seller
Market clearing price The association seems to be mostly a marketing platform plus a bit of information and advocacy.
In the words of the inimitable Ron Swanson of Parks and Recreation,
“Whatever happened to “Hey, I have some apples, would you like to buy them?” “Yes, thank you!” That’s as complicated as it should be to open a business in this country.”I feel like a SETI researcher who finally hears an episode of Gilligan's Island beaming down from Alpha Centauri. I thought I was alone (exceptMike Cannon at Cato,John Goodman of the Goodman institute and a few other assorted oddballs like myself -- oh, and the ghost of Milton Friedman of course) to think that a basically free market, including the guaranteed renewable and transferable insurance that a free market would provide, is a practical goal for US health care. Even normally sensible free market economists usually say silly things like "well, the free market is fine for everything else but health is too important to be left to the free market."
There is hope. Common sense people are starting to see the common sense that health care and health insurance need not be the same thing, and that the same cash market by which we pay contractors, tax preparers, lawyers, architects, financial managers, car repairers, plastic surgeons, vets, and other providers of complex services can lie at the basis of health care.
