The Insatiable Need

'In a free-market system, products and services evolve to serve wants and needs. Some people, like farmers, target needs -- they know that though the need is limited and can be satisfied, people will always get hungry. In this case, demand, while finite, is assured. Other providers focus on wants, and many great entrepreneurs have discovered that the well of wants is far deeper than the well of needs, with one exception. These providers find our desires and produce things to fill them. In this market, products and services will emerge with features we desire balanced against the price we are willing to pay to fill that want.

Health care is unique in that it is an insatiable need of humans. Our most basic instinct is that of survival, and all of us are benefited to that end by health care. The paradox occurs because we all must in fact die at some point. At that point, the health care that would have saved us is either unobtainable for cost reasons or not yet invented. And so our most basic need is unmet at some point in our lives, and though we want to continue to live, we die. While this is not news to anyone, the human desire to live a longer, healthier life is the market-driver in a free health care system.'

- Michael Charles Keehn, 'The Insatiable Need'.

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