iPods and health care

Love to get responses to Dave Smith's blog below. Succinct argument, do you agree?

My iPod died, so I went to buy another one. I had one of the older 40 gig models, which I bought probably 4-5 years ago for something like $400. My new one has 80 gigs of memory, can do video (with very good resolution), and is roughly half as thick. The price? $249.

So for a little more than half the price I get more than double the performance in a smaller, more convenient package. Similar improvements are noticeable with cell phones and laptop computers: all areas where there is extensive competition, not only between companies but also competition against buying nothing.

Yet in the area of health care, where there is intense government regulation and little to no competition on an individual level, expenses keep going up. Of course, all of the Democratic candidates for the Presidency are advocating more government control over health care and less individual choice.

Does anyone think we'd be seeing the vast improvements in iPods if the government took over? More likely, they'd be more expensive and supply would be spotty; after Christmas, we'd probably discover a warehouse in Montana full of them.

Competition works. We should harness the free market and individual choice to make health care more affordable and more available, not more government or corporate bureaucracy. -Dave Smith