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RisingTide, you are so mixed up it is difficult to know where to start.

Our current health care system in $ amount is funded over 50% by government and 35% by employer-provided insurance.  The remaining 15% individual market gets gored by the rising costs caused by the rest of the system.

Private insurers have about 10-12% of administrative costs.  Employers and government have much higher admin costs.  The federal government, as a rule, wastes about 30% of all money flowing through D.C. in administrative costs.

Market forces are inescapable.  I should have stipulated in my last post that FREE Market Forces will lower costs.  Government interference (other than the proper role of fighting fraud) almost always raises costs, and the sum total of interference in the market ALWAYS raises costs.

When it comes to health care, one can make the argument that government should interfere to some extent in order to assure everyone can receive health care (and I support that to a point), but one cannot legitimately argue that the government interference is not raising costs.

Not having to fight with insurance companies is one of the best arguments FOR a free market system.  If you got a high-deductible individual health insurance the same way you get car insurance, homeowners insurance, life insurance, disability insurance, rental insurance, etc., you would have most of your interactions directly with your doctor.  How often do you have to deal with your car insurance company?

Say we moved to a system where the average citizen received a $5000 tax credit to go purchase a plan with a $1000 deductible with preventative services fully covered (or even a $15 rebate from your insurance co.) and a Health Savings Account that you owned and moved with you from job to job and year to year.  This high-ded plan would be much less expensive (and you would be allowed to purchase across state lines), and your employer could still contribute money tax free into your HSA.  Any money you had left over from the $5000 would go straight into your HSA and accumulate.

Under this system, after a couple of years of you and/or your employer adding to your HSA the difference between the cost of your current insurance plan and the lower cost of the High-deductible plan, you would have plenty of money in your HSA to pay for out-of-pocket costs.  Everyone would instantly have a very strong incentive to start shopping around for the best prices for medical services.  Health providers would be forced to become more effecient to compete for your health care dollars.  Competition would drive costs down.  You wouldn't have to deal with your insurance company unless you had major medical expenses.  Millions of Americans that currently get NO tax subsidized health care insurance through there employer would fairly receive the same tax subsidy as everyone else.  The only excuse for not having health insurance would be if you were too lazy to sign up.  Administrative costs would be reduced greatly once everyone got on a plan they liked and insurance companies didn't have to process every single doctor's visit.

The current system is what is RAISING health care costs.  No price or quality transparency, over-regulation of Insurance (you must cover sex-change operations), third-party payer so neither doctor nor patient sees full cost, medicare & insurance fraud, and ridiculous lawsuits that reduce the number of doctors and causes the remaining ones to spend 25-50% of their profits on liability insurance.

I had trouble following your last few paragraphs (under my plan you would have plenty of money in your HSA to purchase the $300 of medication, and where are people not able to see dentists for a toothache??), but if you are worried about the insurance companies denying coverage for services, just wait until the government denies the services altogether, or makes you wait so long for them that you die.  This is what is happening in Canada.  It takes 17 weeks to see your doctor.  There are more MRI's in a large American city than all of Canada.  People with major illnesses often die while waiting for surgeries.  Many others travel to America to pay for services.  Did you know that Canada pays numerous hospitals in northern sections of America to provide services for Canadians?

Other countries keep costs down by rationing health care, the way that Medicare is starting to do now.  Medicare will only pay so much for each procedure, and many doctors now will not provide service to Medicare patients because it is not profitable.  The next step will be for the government to mandate the doctors to not discriminate.  Then the doctors will start going out of business, demand for health care services will overwhelm supply, and you'll start having to wait longer and longer for each appointment.  And nothing will be done to reduce the inefficiencies in the system.  This is the direction we are headed.