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Because this is what government controls have taken away from us. It’s what we need to continue to benefit from life-saving medical advances and care, and be satisfied with our experience with physicians, hospitals, and insurance companies.
State and federal policies have wedged insurance companies between between you and your physician, which erodes the doctor-patient relationship. Doctors have more incentive to please insurance companies than they do to please you, the patient. Government controls have also placed your employer between you and medical insurance companies, so insurers seek to please employers, and not you.
Wait, hold on. In the above I pretty much plagiarized the late Milton Friedman, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics. In “How to Cure Health Care ,” he wrote:
Third-party payment has required the bureaucratization of medical care and, in the process, has changed the character of the relation between physicians (or other caregivers) and patients. A medical transaction is not simply between a caregiver and a patient; it has to be approved as “covered” by a bureaucrat and the appropriate payment authorized. The patient—the recipient of the medical care—has little or no incentive to be concerned about the cost since it’s somebody else’s money. The caregiver has become, in effect, an employee of the insurance company or, in the case of Medicare and Medicaid, of the government. The patient is no longer the one, and the only one, the caregiver has to serve. An inescapable result is that the interest of the patient is often in direct conflict with the interest of the caregiver’s ultimate employer. That has been manifest in public dissatisfaction with the increasingly impersonal character of medical care.
