One of the great things about living in America is people get to vote with their pocketbooks. We choose between competing products, and if we don't like any of our choices, we can keep our money and go without.

This system has served us well for more than 200 years – it is, in fact, why the U.S. is the most innovative country in the world. Competition, paired with the consumer's right to buy nothing at all, forces companies to offer better products at a lower price.

The one area of the economy, as we've heard again and again, where this system doesn't work so well is in health care – that's because this system doesn't apply to health care. Instead, we've elected to finance most of our health care through a third-party payment system where consumers are isolated from the costs – for most services, we simply pay a small co-payment regardless of which provider or which prescription we choose.

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