How can anyone look at our current for-profit medical model and not conclude that it is absurdly wasteful.

The “free market” extremists fail to acknowledge that everyone has need of medical care sometime in their life.

This makes the field of medicine not only essential, but inevitable.

Given this, having a system that by nature wants to increase the number of middle-men just of the sake of maximizing charges, and hence profits, ends up with huge costs to a society that could otherwise be avoided.

re: #44 thedopefishlives

The history of hospitals, at least in the West, is that they were indeed charities run by the church. The poor came to be treated/housed.