Letters to the Editor: Giving consumers money directly won’t fix our healthcare market

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To the editor: Guest contributor Kim-Lien Nguyen dusts off a tired and roundly disproven libertarian solution to our healthcare financing crisis, arguing that giving consumers money directly instead of to private insurers will somehow magically “empower” them to “make their own healthcare choices and leverage their self-interest” ( “Subsidizing insurance just props up dysfunction. Empower consumers instead,” Nov. 20). This assumes that healthcare operates as an ideal free market and consumers and patients are all-knowing about the product they are purchasing when, in fact, the opposite is true.

Does a patient with chest pain that could be a heart attack really have time to stud