Health care consumes resources. In a free market system, health care would be contract-based like every other free-market system. Resources would be supplied by the patient, or the patient would not receive treatment.
But wait. A contract is invalid if the parties involved don't consent, or is incompetent to contract. That means that an unconscious individual requiring treatment would never receive it, because they couldn't consent to pay beforehand. The same applies to children, or the mentally challenged. So what do we do in those situations?
Well, we either treat, or we don't. If we don't treat, people die. Lots of people. If we treat, we run the risk of the doctor not getting paid, especially in cases where the patient literally can't pay. But someone's got to pay the doctor, or health care ceases to exist. We have to have some capacity for a doctor to be paid by someone other than the patient.
In other words, we have to have socialized medicine. The only remaining question is, who pays?
My vote is for the people who are hurt the least. Why on earth would we cause more harm than necessary? Seems rather un-medical...
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