Eight million people have signed up for subsidized private health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, President Obama said this month. Millions more obtained new coverage through the Medicaid program for the poor. Full implementation of the health law has renewed discussions of winners and losers, makers and moochers. Here's a corrective to common misconceptions about who pays for health care. 1) Before Obamacare we had a free-market health care system. Government has been part of the business of medicine at least since the 1940s, when Washington began appropriating billions of dollars to build private and government hospitals. The drug industry and its customers owe much to federally funded research.
