When I had that bleeding ulcer in 2008 I was in the hospital for three days, about half that time in intensive care. I stated out in the emergency room, and that was included in the hospital bill. The ambulance that brought me there was billed separately, $700. The whole hospital bill was about $12,000, which included the main surgeon who supervised my care. I didn't really have surgery, they just stuck a tube up my nose and pumped blood out of my stomach all night. The next morning they took that tube out and put me under while they stuck another tube with a camera down my throat and took pictures of the inside of my stomach. Meanwhile, I had two IVs in each hand, one of them for a blood transfusion and the other three for whatever else they kept pumping into me. When they took me out of intensive they reduced the IVs to one. Several doctors kept checking up on me, and some of them were billed separately because they weren't on the hospital staff. For months afterwards, every time I thought I was done with those people, I would get another bill in the mail. Oh, and I had to see the surgeon several times after I got out, and one of those times he took some more pictures, this time it was an out patient procedure. Earlier in the year, my hypothetical wife and I each had a tooth capped, and I counted that in my $20,000 figure. Actually, it was a little under $20,000 worth of medical expenses that we deducted from our income tax for the year, which knocked about $2000 off our tax bill. All things considered, I thought we got by pretty light.
From the time the paper closed in 1990, until I went on Medicare in 2010, I must have been without health insurance, off and on, for about 10 years. Last I heard, average health insurance premiums were running about 12,000 a year. I figure that a conservative estimate of the money I saved by not buying my own insurance would be at least $100,000. I'm sure that, in the ten year period, all our medical bills put together would not equal half of that figure.
The way that the Canadians set the prices for the various medical procedures is a committee of doctors meets with a government committee and negotiates a price for each procedure. They do this periodically, I think once a year. I don't know if they distinguish between a routine procedure and a procedure with complications but, as far as I know, everybody involved is pretty happy with the whole deal.
When your farmer friend said that "there has been some talk", he probably meant that he and his friends had been discussing the matter over beer or coffee. I doubt that they just pulled their opinions out of thin air, I'm sure that they all read newspapers and watch television just like city folk do.
It's been a long time since I have read any Libertarian literature, but they never impressed me as being Bible thumpers. Cranks maybe, but one person's crank is another person's genius. They want to legalize drugs. They are neither for nor against gay marriage, believing that the government shouldn't be involved in marriage at all. Last I heard, the party was not taking a position on abortion because their membership was pretty evenly divided on the issue. They are generally pro business and anti union, but they are against government subsidies and bailouts of businesses, calling it "corporate welfare". I think that most of their positions are indeed the product of reason, taking their inspiration from the Founding Fathers who lived during the Age of Reason. I think that's their biggest problem, they refuse to recognize that the Age of Reason ended a long time ago. Another problem they have is that they believe in liberty for everyone, and the general public does not. The gun owners want the right to bear arms and the pot smokers want the right to smoke pot, but few people want both rights. People in this country want freedom for themselves and their friends, but they want law and order for everybody else.
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