...your proposal is that the federal government do nothing about the "healthcare problem", whether real or just perceived.

You also suggest that some part of the issue appears to be for the individual states to resolve. But government being government, when it came to that, would we want to keep state government's fingerprints off of healthcare, as well?

I agree with a lot of what you write, but not this time. These problems have been festering for decades. Doing nothing--something our Congress is really good at--has been the easy way out for Congress for a long while. Things aren't getting any better. Healthcare costs and the resultant insurance premiums have skyrocketed to the point that the number of uninsured Americans is far more likely to increase than decrease. Medicare is going broke.

These don't seem to be problems that "doing nothing" will fix. The free market approach has lead us to this point. Is it reasonable to believe that letting the free market work will ultimately correct them?