There is a lot of talk about health care in terms of giving consumers of medical services choice in a marketplace. The basic cost-control measure that the Ryan Plan hopes for is that a market in health insurance will lower prices. Well, it likely won’t. The mechanism that will control prices is the willingness of people to make up the difference between Medicare vouchers and the actual costs. But brushing that aside, Paul Krugman takes ultimate offense to the characterization of “patients as consumers“:
Medical care is an area in which crucial decisions — life and death decisions — must be made; yet making those decisions intelligently requires a vast amount of specialized knowledge; and often those decisions must also be made under conditions in which the patient is incapacitated, under severe stress, or needs action immediately, with no time for discussion, let alone comparison shopping.
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The…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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