Here's the thesis: Routine health care, like routine food purchases, should be paid for directly by the consumer rather than paid for through indirections like insurance/employment benefits/government.

As soon as you show me how a chicken dinner can usually cost $10, but can sometimes cost $75,000 instead, I'll allow that this is not an idiotic mischaracterization of the basic nature of health care.

If you drive your car through the KFC window due to tragic combination of chicken grease, fingers, and steering wheel, your chicken dinner may very well cost $75,000. It makes sense to insure against that risk. But you don't have to insure against the $10 chicken dinners to insure against that.

That makes sense when you keep it inside the metaphor; however there is a large difference between providing a chicken dinner, and providing healthcare. The full costs would be prohibitive for nearly everyone if everyone only paid for what they use. Meaning the system might be unfair but it is arguably better than no system at all.

I think an important issue is that life isn't fair. Some people need nothing but routine checkups for 90 years. Some children need a million dollars of medical care before they're 10 years old. I don't think it's fair to say that if you happen to get a rare and costly-to-treat disease, you're just screwed. It makes much more sense to me to balance healthcare costs roughly equally across the whole population.

What keeps this system fair is that everyone really is recieving the same thing: the promise of good health care no matter what health issues they encounter. Health care systems work because most people pay for more than they "use." Whether it's the goverment or private companies that organize this system of most people paying a little more so some people can use a lot more makes no difference to me. I think it's the right system, so the question to me is just whether it works or not. Current U.S. health care is broken in a lot of ways, and I'm not sure it can fixed while it stays in the market. If the government can make a system where everyone pays roughly equally and everyone recieves all the care they need, then let them take it over. If they can't, then they should be working to find someone who can.

Or to come back to the analogy, some people need to eat 10 chickens a day and some people can live on a wing a week. If people pay out of pocket for their chicken, then some people will just starve to death. There is no avoiding it. No one can afford the amount of chicken that some people need.

In a system where routine healthcare was paid for out of pocket, it would inevitably be more affordable. Right now, it's priced by a colluding insurers and providers, and the high costs of non-routine care are subsidized by overpriced routine care.

This is definitely anti government-run healthcare.

Well, then it's incoherent. Or at least I don't understand the point he is trying to make.

I think he is arguing that healthcare is just a commodity.

or that clinics should be combined with taco bells.