The free market is better equipped to make that culture change happen.
A lot of people will be fucked in transition though. Even if a lot of health issues are lifestyle related, a whole bunch aren't.
30% of the current yearly healthcare expenditures in the US are a direct result of lifestyle choices. If you eliminated that, eliminated the tens of billions in yearly medicare fraud, encouraged automation/efficiency in the industry, introduced more competition, and leveraged the free market to get people to live healthier lives...you'd suddenly reduce the costs of the system so much that spending for the rest of the sick is suddenly trivial compared with the total yearly tax revenue of the US.
How do you go about doing this without fucking innocent people over in transition?
How would it fuck over innocent people?
You can't just eliminate that 30%. It's not cut and dry. Who decides what's a lifestyle effect and what was unpreventable? How do you eliminate those billions in fraud, who's going to pay for the ridiculous amount of investigations to make sure that there actually is fraud in each case? With a completely free market, why would insurance companies willingly keep cancer patients and other chronic diseases?
Someone has to make the decision regardless, for ANY government program. Even universal healthcare is going to require someone to decide what is "necessary" treatment and what is "optional" or "cosmetic" treatment. There's no easy answer in any solution, because not everyone can have everything, so someone inevitably has to decide who gets and who doesn't. This is true of ANY social program.
Right, but he's proposing to let the free market decide. It CAN'T be that, needs to be objective