A number of US states have homestead exemptions like that; TX does, for example. Some federal regulations of private industry would affect malpractice AND health insurance premiums a lot more directly than federal laws on how much you can award a widow when a doctor removes his heart instead of his kidney, or a truck driver with a VERY bad driving record makes an illegal left turn around another truck and literally rolls right over your SUV stopped at a light (which is actually what happened to my uncle, who could've easily earned another million dollars as longshoreman before he retired, and left his pregnant eldest and teenage youngest daughters wondering how they'd even have a place to live. ) In the latter case the trucking companys decision to settle out of court was almost entirely due to knowing they'd lose a trial and pay more money if they didn't. Another potential partial solution to the healthcare problem is to rescind private insurance exemptions from federal antitrust laws that have existed since the 1890s so that they actually have to compete in something called "a free market" rather than making deals with individual states to shut their competition out of those markets completely. Once again, laissez-faire and free market economies aren't synonymous; they're actually mutually exclusive.

As to the other, I trust you note that the person to whom I responded doesn't dispute my analogy at all, and is essentially defending the merits of a statement I made with heavy sarcasm. In America it's important to remember that "libertarian" and "Libertarian" are rarely synonymous, and whether he supports them or not, many of Cannolis statements are consistent with the latters platform.