>Dragan, believe me that the WTO is *not* the reason why healthcare is so expensive in the US. Some authorities estimate that well over half the cost is down to "process" including lawyering and its consequences such as a full barrage of tests any time somebody sees a physician with a headache. Try a "no fault" compensation scheme and see what happens to the costs. ;-)

WTO is a tool to override local laws. One can't rely on politicians to always legislate properly and keep the profits where gravity pulls them. They sometimes want to pander to the lowest common denominator and impose some unhealthy limits to business - which is why a body which is above the laws is required.

I know one reason - the bureaucratic overhead of hundreds of insurances in a cartesian matching with hundreds of actual healers, each one of them having a system of their own, a price list, a method of calculating the rebate etc etc. I learned that once during a job interview in a company which actually lived by replacing the insurance with pooling their users' buying power and thus taking the rebate - and keeping a percentage of the savings, passing the rest to the payers. They had to keep up with only one side of it - the doctors' billing - and match that to the paperwork of their users.

Now imagine an average health insurance - they have to do all that (keeping a watchful eye on them pesky doctors who always want to spend more money, sometimes even in a bona fide attempt to save a life, but sometimes just don't have a clue how to bill and need to be brought to their senses), then with companies who are paying, then with patients who always think that they are somehow entitled to ridiculous amounts of care and are prone to swindling, then the friends from pharmaceutical companies who manage to charm our doctors into always using the more expensive version of aspirin, then the small stockholders who actually own about one tenth fortytwoth of one percent of the insurance, and not only don't know of which percent they own a part, they don't know in which company - they only want profits, then the large stockholders who can actually fire the CEO (with a 100M golden parachute), which is why the CEO can fire anyone who strays from the main goal: making profit.

And someone should get healthy along the way, that's good PR.