America's ailing health care system could ultimately be blamed on the federal government's de facto confiscation of the individual's innate responsibility for choosing (and ability to demand) quality medical care, wrote Milton Friedman in an enlightened 2001 diagnosis.

The government then reassigned that responsibility to impersonal and uninvested third parties, namely employers and government bureaucrats. Per the historical pattern, the state subsequently stacked failure upon failure and threw good money after foolish ideas until medical costs today soar nearly beyond comprehensible description:

Two simple observations are key to explaining both the high level of spending on medical care and the dissatisfaction with that spending. The first is that most payments to physicians or hospitals or other caregivers for medical care are made not by the patient but by a third party—an insurance company or employer or governmental body. The second is that nobody spends somebody else's money as wisely or as frugally as he spends his own.

No third party is involved when we shop at a supermarket. We pay the supermarket clerk directly: the same for gasoline for our car, clothes for our back, and so on down the line.

...We have become so accustomed to employer-provided medical care that we regard it as part of the natural order. Yet it is thoroughly illogical. Why single out medical care? Food is more essential to life than medical care. Why not exempt the cost of food from taxes if provided by the employer? Why not return to the much-reviled company store when workers were in effect paid in kind rather than in cash?

The revival of the company store for medicine has less to do with logic than pure chance. It is a wonderful example of how one bad government policy leads to another. During World War II, the government financed much wartime spending by printing money while, at the same time, imposing wage and price controls. The resulting repressed inflation produced shortages of many goods and services, including labor. Firms competing to acquire labor at government-controlled wages started to offer medical care as a fringe benefit. That benefit proved particularly attractive to workers and spread rapidly.

Initially, employers did not report the value of the fringe benefit to the Internal Revenue Service as part of their workers' wages. It took some time before the IRS realized what was going on. When it did, it issued regulations requiring employers to include the value of medical care as part of reported employees' wages. By this time, workers had become accustomed to the tax exemption of that particular fringe benefit and made a big fuss. Congress responded by legislating that medical care provided by employers should be tax-exempt.

If access to quality medical care is indeed a "right," as so many who advocate freedom-amputating socialist "solutions" often proclaim, then it is encompassed in the "self-evident" rights the Declaration of Independence recognizes -- that we're all "endowed by (our) Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

In other words, we indeed absolutely have a birthright to seek and secure through non-coercive means the best health care a free society and a free economy can provide.  And if government "becomes destructive of these ends" -- if it imposes systems virtually guaranteed to undermine both life and liberty, "Safety and Happiness" -- then freedom's defenders must exercise "the Right," the responsibility, "to alter or to abolish" the offending government powers and policies.

Like his fellow giants of modern free-market economic thought -- Hayek, Mises, Hazlitt, Rothbard, Rand, et al. -- Friedman possessed voluminous awareness for government's destructive nature. One of his most penetrating convictions was that, far from being more "humane" or "compassionate" than market freedom, coercive central planning and force-backed collectivist impulses are the true and evil root of most human-caused misery, suffering and, indeed, "market failure" in the world.

"What most people really object to when they object to a free market is that it is so hard for them to shape it to their own will," said Friedman in 1961. "The market gives people what the people want instead of what other people think they ought to want. At the bottom of many criticisms of the market economy is really lack of belief in freedom itself."

What people want with health care is what they want from other sectors of the economy: good and affordable products, safe and effective services and treatment. To remedy the perverse government-concocted malady currently afflicting us, this, like Milton Friedman, you've got to believe: Freedom is the soundest prescription, liberty the surest cure.