I would also hesitate to agree with the premise that individuals could not - barring regulations inhibiting them - negotiate themselves as groups.  In fact, if companies were to arise that facilitated this service for multiple voluntary groups, the overhead that business have (those that maintain staff to sort out their insurance purchases) could possibly be reduced.  

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So here's some of that brilliant argumentation by Krugman:

"And you can't just trust insurance companies either -- they're not in business for their health, or yours."

Just as home insurers aren't in business to pay claims, but they do anyway. Plus, government providers aren't in business for their citizen's health either. They're in the business of winning elections.

"This problem is made worse by the fact that actually paying for your health care is a loss from an insurers' point of view -- they actually refer to it as "medical costs.""

This point is literally retarded. Any form of insurance has the same dynamic. If my car insurer didn't view payouts as a cost, it would quickly fail. This is almost as stupid as his description of the Austrian Business Cycle.

"This means both that insurers try to deny as many claims as possible, and that they try to avoid covering people who are actually likely to need care."

So they don't just open the checkbook with every claim? Do single-payers systems? And they don't want to "insure" people who are already really ill? Shocking! Imagine a home insurer who refused to cover someone who built a house in a flood plain that flooded every other year. Shocking! Maybe insurers should agree to give full coverage at the usual rates to anyone who decided to buy insurance after getting Hodgkin's.

"Both of these strategies use a lot of resources, which is why private insurance has much higher administrative costs than single-payer systems. And since there's a widespread sense that our fellow citizens should get the care we need -- not everyone agrees, but most do -- this means that private insurance basically spends a lot of money on socially destructive activities."

As we know from our experience with Medicare, the Iraq War, and any other government enterprise, the costs are being low-balled. And if Krugman wanted to see that everyone got care, he and his rich friends could pay for something themselves instead of free-loading all the time.

"The second thing about health care is that it's complicated, and you can't rely on experience or comparison shopping. ("I hear they've got a real deal on stents over at St. Mary's!") That's why doctors are supposed to follow an ethical code, why we expect more from them than from bakers or grocery store owners."

This is more raw idiocy. Has Krugman never heard of hospital rankings? Why does he think that patients go to Seattle from throughout the US and Canada to receive cancer treatments? Maybe they compared hospitals?

"You could rely on a health maintenance organization to make the hard choices and do the cost management, and to some extent we do. But HMOs have been highly limited in their ability to achieve cost-effectiveness because people don't trust them -- they're profit-making institutions, and your treatment is their cost."

STUPID. How can Krugman trust Toyota to make a road-worthy Prius? Doesn't he realize that Toyota is a PROFIT-MAKING INSTITUTION and therefore doesn't care if he rams into a wall at freeway speed? (Only non-profit institutions care about doing a good job.) His brakes are their cost! His crumple zones are their cost! His pyrotechnic pre-tensioners are their cost!

"Between those two factors, health care just doesn't work as a standard market story."

Because he and his ilk have sold a Utopian idea.

"All of this doesn't necessarily mean that socialized medicine, or even single-payer, is the only way to go. There are a number of successful health-care systems, at least as measured by pretty good care much cheaper than here, and they are quite different from each other. There are, however, no examples of successful health care based on the principles of the free market, for one simple reason: in health care, the free market just doesn't work."

Krugman has already said before that we're halfway to socialized medicine and the reasons are obvious: 46% of health care in the US is paid for with government-stolen money and the tax structure is FDRdiotic.

"And people who say that the market is the answer are flying in the face of both theory and overwhelming evidence."