A recent and glaring example of wasted health care spending:

  The Siamese twin affair.  $2 million for a 5% chance of saving one
life (as estimated by a doctor with a commercial interest in huge TV
exposure, working at the hospital receiving $2 million) is a pretty
dubious gamble -- an order of magnitude estimate of the value of an
average American life is: $25000 per year for 40 productive years, or
$1 million.  Nowhere near $100 million.

An all-too-common scenario:

  An old man with Alzheimers disease receiving triple bypass heart
surgery costing $300,000.

  If hospitals or health insurance companies would try to compare what
they're spending to the value of what they're trying to save, health
care spending could be much more rational.  To that end, I have my
very own cold-blooded pie-in-the-sky privatized health-care plan:

Instead of worrying about what's a legal claim and what isn't, have
medical insurers run lifetime health-care funds.

Let's say a newborn baby should get a lifetime health-care fund of $.5
million.  These could be funded by regular payments like current
insurance, or by some more reasonable plan (like an income tax paid to
the insurer). If unspent at death, this money reverts to the insurer
(or, give it to dependents and call it life insurance).  If the money
runs out, you stop receiving health-care service unless

1) you can pay for it yourself.
2) you can convince your friends to pay for it.
3) you can convince your insurance company or a bank that you will
make money, and convince them to give you a loan.

  Each patient would now have an interest in getting cost-effective
care, and might for instance refuse procedures as being overly
expensive or unnecessary.  Hospitals would actually lose business for
being wildly inefficient, as opposed to the insurers bearing the 80%
or more of the costs and raising premiums.