That the free market won’t work for medicine is an economic truth by now ancient and undisputed. Consumers can’t make efficient decisions about how much medicine to buy or how much to pay for it. It is, after all, the essence of a free market that we have to be free to say no—free to choose means free to stamp away from a bad deal. It is the essence of medicine, though, that everyone sooner or later needs a lot of it and cannot possibly walk away, disgusted, from this or that producer’s stall. When Mom is seriously ill, we don’t want a cheap mastectomy done by a second-rate surgeon. We properly want the best. So we trust our doctor, whose solemnly taken oath is not to save us money but to get us the finest care—and who is, no shame on her, trying to make a little money for herself. The market won’t work for medicine —as much because of the inexorability of mortality as because of the inefficiency of markets.