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No one denies that America’s health care system is sick. But there’s little agreement on the right treatment — and too little willingness to abandon the dependency mindset that has led to the system’s ills.

“There is no doubt that America’s health care system warrants immediate attention and various culprits have been blamed for the system’s slow disintegration,” says the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Kalese Hammonds. “Much of the anger consumers feel with today’s health care system is directed at rising costs and out-of-pocket expenses.”

But that anger is often misdirected, Ms. Hammonds says.

“Surprisingly, their discontent does not lie with the restrictive policies and protectionist-minded policymakers who have created the inflated prices, and their frustration has not been with the exorbitant amount of their tax dollars spent paying for other people’s health care,” she says. “The overwhelming cry is that the government has not done enough.”

On the contrary, the government has been quite active — often in irrelevant, if not detrimental, ways.

“A look at recent government campaigns reveals another story,” Ms. Hammonds says. “In New York City, a federal judge has approved a city ordinance that would require chain restaurants to post calorie information on menus. Proposed legislation in Mississippi would prohibit restaurants from serving people with a Body Mass Index greater than 30.”

These are not isolated instances, she adds.

“Intrusive tactics like these represent a growing trend in government over-reach, while the overwhelming reception of bureaucratic involvement reveals a sense of government reliance never before seen in the United States,” Ms. Hammonds says. “There is no greater testament to our society’s embrace of dependency than the battle cry to expand government health programs and extend coverage to higher-income families.”

The federal government already spends more than $700 billion a year on health services to millions of low-income households.

“This money comes straight from the pockets of fellow taxpayers, redistributing the hard-earned money of those earning more and giving it to those earning less,” Ms. Hammonds points out. “A number of studies have concluded that as much as 60 percent of the children newly eligible for the State Children’s Health Insurance Program already have private health insurance. Under this new dependency mentality, people are dropping their private coverage for subsidized government programs at an alarming rate.”

In effect, more and more people are depending on fewer and fewer.

“The majority of health care proposals — expanding public programs, extending government subsidies, requiring employers to contribute to health care benefits — appeal to this new dependency mentality,” she says. “These strategies build on the fundamental structure of our already broken system, forcing a select group of individuals to subsidize health care for a growing portion of our population, increasing government dependency and further insulating the majority of consumers from the cost of health care.”

That just makes matters worse.

Such policies “eliminate the financial consequences of poor lifestyle choices and open the door to over-reaching government policies,” Ms. Hammonds points out. “The expansion of public programs creates financial incentives for the government to implement policies that define individual lifestyle choices and manipulate the market place in an effort to constrain health care spending.”

To bring about a real cure for the health care system, policymakers must cut deep.

“An effective transformation of American health care will require dismantling the current structure and rebuilding a consumer driven market crafted around personal responsibility and competition,” she says. “Allowing the health care system to harness market forces would entail limiting government control of health insurance and health care providers.”

The simple truth is that competition and personal responsibility are the cures for what ails the health care system.