“A stock argument against a free market in medicine is that markets rarely provide cures to chronic diseases because it’s more profitable to sell pills that merely treat the symptoms of a disease, giving you a customer for life, than to sell a single course of pills that cures the disease. The obvious flaw in this argument is that people will pay much more for a month-long course of pills that cures a chronic disease than for a month-long course of pills that does nothing but suppress the symptoms for a month. In fact, the price a patient should be willing to pay for the cure is equal to the expected net present cost of paying for the non-cure treatment for the rest of his life, plus the value of not having to deal with any symptoms not suppressed by the treatment. Granted, not everyone has that much cash on hand, but that’s what insurance is for.” (02/01/08)