It's not a free market system. I wish it was. It's amazing how people vote for government protected cartels. It took the press (Time magazine article two years

It's not a free market system. I wish it was. It's amazing how people vote for government protected cartels. It took the press (Time magazine article two years back) an incredibly long time to start digging into fraudulent healthcare pricing - since then some things have started moving (legislation in some states to force hospitals to show prices, at least to bring in some semblance of a market and allow market forces to start operating). In a true free market environment such abuse by an incumbent/system would lead to innovation and new ideas that would quickly obliterate the monopoly, in this case the monopoly has the guns (i.e. regulation/government protected insurance and health care industry). Disclaimer: I lived in Austria/Germany for decades and their system is worse because it's totally closed to any potential market innovation while taxing the living daylights out of the middle class.