Can you explain to me what you mean by "his naivete' about dealing with other nations" please? I have only understood him to want to protect our borders not completely ignore other nations.

Healthcare is one of those issues that has become a sticky wicket due to the government intervention that began 50 years ago with Medicare.

First of all, healthcare insurance, like all insurance, is socialized risk. And like all things socialized, the individual has been moved a step back from any negotiation for services. We've allowed insurance companies to negotiate the price of those services (and the government has stupidly intervened and created false markets to skew pricing). Very few would want to go back to the days of paying for healthcare personally and negotiating the prices like we do for houses and cars. Businesses made a half-hearted attempt in the late 70's and early 80's when co-pays were first introduced. Plus we'd need a lot more doctors if they had to spend any time negotiating pricing. Through those years individuals got services that they wouldn't have paid for if they had to pay personally. That boon created an advance in medical services, procedures and equipment that may not have been invented if no one would have purchased them. Now we are used to getting all those bennies and don't want to give them back and it has left us trapped. A market solution will always be best, but to do that here will require many to take a leap backwards in care. Obamacare itself will do that forcibly, but it also takes freedom of choice out of the equation and leaves the government to make those choices for us. As we know, they are notoriously bad at making choices.

According to Adam Smith in "The Wealth of Nations", the free market depends on the free movement of goods and labor in order to be truly free. Any barriers to the movement of goods or labor decrease the freedom of the market to some degree.

With respect to healthcare, I have heard many people complain that they don't like their jobs, but they stay because of the healthcare coverage they get. (While some of these complaints were mere groaning, some were also very sincere.)

If healthcare were driven by the individual rather than by the employer, this barrier would disappear and employees would be more free to investigate other employment options. I don't believe it is in the long-term interests of either the employee OR the employer to have a dissatisfied employee on the payroll. I would like to give employees every option to find a position of employment in which they can be valuable and be rewarded according to their labors, and for which they can receive if only some small modicum of satisfaction for a job well done and commensurate compensation.

For employers, it also means that if they are having trouble filling positions, it might be because of adverse workplace conditions, etc. that affect the perceived value of the employee's work. If employees are more free to choose other places of employ, employers would be driven to either reform their workplaces or raise their wages to compensate. The reverse is also true: if an employer has found that golden workplace environment that encourages the best from his employees, he will likely entertain a surplus of applicants for positions and thus be able to exchange a good workplace for monetary wages. It should also be noted that in each of these situations, the market resolves the problems itself as a natural effect of interaction - the government is noticeably and intentionally sidelined. :)

I wish it were that simplistic, but it isn't.

There are a couple of reasons why it is done through the employer (I'm not advocating, just saying):
1. it is a financial incentive with which to competitively vie for labor. Or at least that's what it was originally when it was invented in the 50's.
2. Group policies allow insurers to weigh risk as a group rather than as individuals, making them in aggregate less expensive than a group of individual policies.
3. The government now gives allowances for health insurance to employers. Or they used to. Now they issue mandates.

There are myriad problems with this system, however, most notably the problem of third-party payer. When we do not bear the full costs of a market transaction, we get a distorted value perception of the transaction. When a transaction is subsidized by corporate or government involvement, it is easier to use more of that good or service than we normally would because we have means we wouldn't have otherwise had.
This also extends to the provider side of the equation.

Another problem with this is that the healthcare is tied to the employer rather than the employee, severely undermining the overall mobility of labor in the workforce.

In my version of the new world, healthcare "insurance" (I really don't like that word with reference to health) would be negotiated and paid for by individuals on behalf of themselves (and their families, etc.) with the insurers/providers. Providers/insurers would not be limited by state borders (as they currently are), enabling labor force mobility. Employers (if they chose) would pay a tax-deductible insurance incentive to the employee as a flat amount (similar to an HSA). Individuals would choose a la carte the provisions they wanted to include on their healthcare plan - just like with their automobile or life insurance plans.

Yeah, I'm an idealist. But I'd like to think that if you don't shoot for the stars, you won't even get to the moon.

It's one of the main reasons I could never bring myself to vote for him. I agree with him on a lot of things, but his foreign policy wasn't one of them.

That being said, I'd sure take him over Obama.

Ron Paul: "'The left never asks, 'Whose rights must we violate in order to get what we want?'".
As blarman points out, this nails it.