You're giving capitalism a bad name by calling the American health care system capitalist ( especially the system in Massachusetts). American healthcare is just as regulated as Europe. The difference is that while most European systems run on a system of price ceilings for care, America has a system of price floors. Since there are pretty steep diminishing returns to health care spending, price floors have the neat effect of making health care super expensive without increasing quality.
American capitalism has many advantages. Health care is not one of them.
I'm not saying that our system is capitalism. I'm saying that socialized medicine (which is what other countries have) and big government flies right in the face of what this country is based upon, personal liberty, responsibility and freedom.
And show me any place in history that price controls have been an effective fiscal policy.
Look at the third world and see how well it works for them.
I lived in a place where the price of a loaf of bread was fixed at x. Well when x was a fair price and provided profit to the baker everyone was happy. 10 years later, people were so used to bread being x that when noone could make bread any more because the cost of the ingredients had gone up so much there were riots. So what did the government do? They raised minimum wage and price controlled the ingredients for bread. So all the bakeries closed down. And now a bunch of other shops closed down or fired their employees. Then what? Laws making it impossible to fire an employee.
I'd prefer a health care system with no regulations and no price controls.
But if forced to choose between the system in the US, and the system in France, I would choose the French system. France provides equal enough care for what I want, at a far lower price. I suspect that a completely unregulated system would be better than both. But the United States does not have such a system. The US system is not technically "socialized", but the regualations are so badly designed the outcome is far worse than a socialized system.
Libtertarians often get so caught up in the quantity of regulation that they do not care about the quality of regulation. There are many cases where outright socialism is better than a terribly misregulated private system. By reflexively defending the misregulated private system as the lesser of two evils, libertarians ruin the credibility of both themselves and of capitalism.
>I'm saying that socialized medicine (which is what other countries have) and big government flies right in the face of what this country is based upon, personal liberty, responsibility and freedom.
Well, you're probably correct there. As a entrepreneur though, it's rather dangerous to let ideology dictate a solution to a problem, especially if something else can do a better job.
You can certainly argue about whether social medicine is that something else, but to remove something from consideration simply because it "isn't how we do things here" sounds like a recipe for failure if you ask me.
American capitalism has many advantages. Health care is not one of them.