Caveat: I have no idea what I'm talking about. It makes sense to me that an insurer would never be a good analogy for a grocery store, but that problem seems s

Caveat: I have no idea what I'm talking about. It makes sense to me that an insurer would never be a good analogy for a grocery store, but that problem seems specific to the insurance model, rather than to medicine itself. That's more what I meant to ask about. If we imagine that hospitals and patients work like grocery stores and their customers, a few obvious problems come up: - Healthcare is too complicated for patients to make informed choices. - Emergency medicine is too urgent for patients to have much choice anyway. - Demand for care is unevenly and unfairly distributed, because of conditions people are born with. So I guess my question is, how much of medicine (in terms of dollars) hits those problems? Cancer treatment seems to hit at least two out of three. But on the other hand, a lot of dentistry seems not to.