Clearly, its a problem a free market will efficiently fix and prices will stay low. </sarcasm>

At least price transparency worked for surgeries in a hospital in Oklahoma: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6014794

Perhaps a similar approach could work for IVs.

the best solution is obviously some kind of public-private partnership, so that we can get the best parts of the public sector with the best parts of the private sector. There's no way we'll wind up with the worst parts of both.

Turns out, it is.

Even if one is willing to accept them into one's general worldview... First principles - like "government is wasteful" - only go so far in the face of conflicting data. And there is a lot of it on the topic of healthcare systems.

The government is wasteful and inefficient, but it is not the most wasteful and inefficient system possible.

Politics is the art of figuring out when to burn the extra resources on the government method because all of the other available methods are even worse.

Whelp, the private sector sure seems to be fuckin' it up, so maybe it's time we give the government a shot.

Which private sector is that? Because our current healthcare system is nowhere near "private".

Well it's also nowhere near "public". For the most part we're talking about private hospitals and private insurance companies, the combination of which have failed to bring U.S. healthcare costs in line with the rest of the world.

Don't simply blame "regulation" either. Many industries are regulated, some heavily so, and still manage to produce companies that are profitable and efficiently deliver good products.

I don't think we'll see a real solution to the healthcare system in America until we stop treating it like it's just like any other industry.

at least all our patient data will be private. If we keep all of our private information in the hands of the HMOs and other corporations, the NSA might install a backdoor.

It's funny, because you seem to think that health care professionals, with their myriad Excel spreadsheets and mammoth stacks of Steelcase® file cabinets brimming with rainbow color-coordinated folders containing paper files seem to know the first thing about information security.

These are non-technical people, who went to school mostly for biology and chemistry, or for the lowly clerks, and secretaries in your doctor's office, maybe two years of community college, with an associates degree in communications maybe. On average, take a random sample of the people who do the paper work for the lofty, priest-like physicians. Ask them what AES is, or what a SHA hash is, or even what SSL and TLS are. I guarantee you, that you'll get a blank stare.

They know how to use the systems they're provided with, like they know how to open a bag of Oreo cookies. The doctors know how to pay IT professionals for services, like they know how to write a check, and know to procure electronic systems like they know how to make down payments on their Mercedes. You can be sure that they know how to shred all those e-mails that they print out and read over their morning coffee.

It's only as private insofar as no one is supposed to look. This protects people under the law, in that, as a rule, certain information is not to be used as criteria for making certain business decisions. But this is merely a bureaucratic honor system, and it doesn't mean that people aren't aware of things they aren't supposed to know about. The information itself, frequently, isn't particularly "secure" according to more strenuous information security standards. Your credit card transactions are safer than your HIPAA information by a longshot, but mostly because there really isn't any sort of criminal profit motive behind obtaining and using that sort of information.

You come down quite hard on healthcare professionals, with the comments about biology and chemistry being non-technical. Your comments about doctors also seem unrepresentative of what a modern doctor must actually know and accomplish in order to be a practicing physician.

In other words, we should trust the DHHS and the IRS with information that the NSA can't be trusted to access? Am I reading that correctly?

Only fools and ideologues argue against systems which have been demonstrated to work.