 Many people today are concerned about the rising cost of health care, particularly in the United States. This indeed is one of the prime motivations for President Obama's health care reform proposals, so-called Obamacare Plan. There's been quite a lot of backlash politically and otherwise against Obamacare, but most people agree that something is wrong with the health care system, particularly in the United States, and that something needs to be done, in particular, to get prices down. One of the problems with health care pricing in the United States is that the prices are not at all transparent. When most of us go to the doctor or go to the hospital, we're relatively unaware of how much we're actually paying for the various procedures that we get. Mainly, we ourselves do not pay. We pay a little upfront cost, and then our health insurance provider pays the rest. Indeed, there's a study just out in the last couple of days by a group in Colorado called the Center for Improving Value in Health Care, pointing out how much variety in prices there can be for a single procedure. They noted, for example, that in Colorado, in Denver alone, a colonoscopy, which is a very standard procedure, can range in price from $400 to $2,800. When we shop for most goods and services, like restaurants or automobiles or vacations, we can go online and compare prices and get customer reviews and really do some comparison shopping. With medical services, we typically can't do that. There's simply no way to find out how much things cost. If we had more transparency in prices, this Colorado group argues, and I agree, there would be more pressure on health care providers to compete on price to keep prices down to be more efficient. Most health care providers go a long way to avoid disclosing how much things cost. One reason is there are huge and highly variable markups on very standard procedures. I had dinner with a couple of doctors a few weeks ago, and they reported how a simple injection that can cost less than $10 to the doctor can be priced to the buyer anywhere from $200 to $400, depending on who's paying. The problem here has to do with this so-called third-party payer system. Most Americans don't pay for health care expenses out of pocket. Their insurance company pays, or if they have Medicare or Medicaid, the government pays. This results in consumers having little incentive to learn about prices and to compare prices among providers. Why do we have a third-party payer system? So even leaving aside Medicare and Medicaid, most Americans have insurance provided by their employer, and that's no coincidence. It's because the U.S. Tax Code considers employer-provided health benefits to be an untaxed benefit. If I pay for health care services or health insurance premiums out of my own pocket, I have to pay income tax on those. So it's this peculiarity of the tax code that leads to the dominance of these third-party payers, which means that consumers are not price-sensitive, and all of this contributes to the high cost of medical care in the U.S. In an earlier Mises' view, I argued that health care goods and services were really not that different from other goods and services, and that the free market could provide effective and affordable health care just as it provides automobiles and shoes and housing and other goods and services. The key is to let the market do what it does and to avoid government intervention that leads to the third-party payer system and other mechanisms that prevent competition and keep prices high and quality low. We can have an effective free market in health care services if the government will just allow it to work.