insurance costs in the free market

This morning on Fox and Friends, John Stossel brought up a good point about our consumption of health-care and the cost of providing it through a third party. He rightly observed that if we had grocery insurance, we'd all be buying steaks every night, $50 bottles of wine and, tiramisu for dessert, because somebody else would be paying for it all. The same goes for basic health-care. We expect somebody else to pay for the most basic care and as a result, we consume it as if it were free. If we had to pay for routine checkups and procedures out of our pockets, we would consume far less of it and the price of it would go down. That's how the free market works.

Obama's plan of going to single-payer(the federal government) would only make the problem exponentially worse.

We need insurance only for catastrophes like car wrecks, cancer and, heart attacks, etc. We should budget for our routine health-care out of our pockets the same as we budget for gas, food, clothing, entertainment, etc. But this health-care take over isn't about providing everybody with affordable health-care. There are far better and cheaper ways to do that. Just like with all of Obama's policy initiatives, it's about expanding the scope and reach of the federal government into and over the lives of individuals.