>>So it has nothing to do with the fact that hospitals charge more for an overnight stay than the Ritz in Paris?

If you had a huge fund set aside, a) inelastic prices are infuriating but not such a burden, but more importantly b) if you incentivize the team paid to oversee the fund also to manage costs, suddenly there's *somebody* willing to rationalize outgoings not through desperation to try to drive down costs, as Medicare does currently which excites opposition, but because it's whet payers are supposed to do. If you have time, check out pricing models for hospitals knowingly built in already over-provisioned locales and see the efficiency and cost at which they're allowed to operate. All while insisting that it's a successful market in which government should not interfere. Ha.