The link provides access to documents discussing attrition bias in the original Rand survey. In summary, statistical analysis indicates that patients in the high co-pay groups dropped out at a greater rate when they required hospitalization.

http://www.rand.org/health/projects/hie/documents/b_newhouse...

Newhouse also writes: "All the Experimental cost-sharing plans had a stop-loss feature that was at most $1,000 for medical spending for the entire family for a year and less for lower income families. (The $1,000 is in late 1970s dollars, which is about $3,400 in 2007 dollars if one inflates by the all-items Consumer Price Index.)"

In other words,the cap on out of pocket expenses was roughly equivalent to three or four months worth of family health insurance premiums in today's market.

The glibertarians' favorite experiment -- which is (btw) 30 years old and unreplicated despite attempts, and has methodological flaws. To name just one: a number of people dropped out of the study. The authors have dismissed this as a concern, but you don't have to think to hard to figure out why it is a real problem. Second, as the author admits: "For most people enrolled in the RAND experiment, who were typical of Americans covered by employment-based insurance, the variation in use across the plans appeared to have minimal to no effects on health status. By contrast, for those who were both poor and sick -- people who might be found among those covered by Medicaid or lacking insurance -- the reduction in use was harmful, on average"

Good system.

This unproductive argument is exactly what's wrong with your Pickett's Charge case against the ethics of insurance as oppposed to "cost pooling". People who disagree with your slippery slope argument will just put you on their own slippery slope; pretty soon you'll be arguing that yes, it's only fair for us to be buying everyone's kids X360's.

There are plenty of pragmatic problems in the current system to address arguments to. The solutions to those problems will improve people's lives without requiring anyone to adopt new political ideologies.

I'll ignore you ad-hominem attack on people you disagree with.

Please name a single attempt to replicate the RAND experiment (i.e., a randomized trial). Really, I'm waiting. I ask because I'd really love to see something more current. It would be amazingly useful.

Incidentally, you are eliding some other interesting facts the RAND experiment turned up. For the healthiest 80% of the poor, being in the 5% copay group made them less healthy. In all cases, the variation was very small. This is roughly what you'd expect in a study statistically measuring many null results - a few measures turn up non-zero purely by chance.

Similarly, if you study the affect of prayer on 30 or 40 different medical problems, you are likely to come up with 1 or 2 positives.