One of the primary reasons healthcare is so expensive in the US is that so many of the factors that influence price are not constrained by competition. Fixing t

One of the primary reasons healthcare is so expensive in the US is that so many of the factors that influence price are not constrained by competition. Fixing those problems is largely a political matter, not an economic one. The economics of capitalist systems do not make any claims about the functionality of markets that are allowed to exist without competition. Which is why all serious free market economists exclusively promote competitive free markets. A free market economist who doesn’t believe government has a role in ensuring markets are competitive is really just an extreme libertarian. Any market where the buyer is not the person who’s paying, or where the buyer has to make a purchasing decision before they know the price (or even what goods/services they’re agreeing to buy), cannot possibly be influenced by the laws of supply and demand. It’s the same reason that you can look at essentially any government spending project, and amaze yourself by how little the government manages to achieve with so much money. The payer doesn’t have any choice about how much taxes they pay, and the decision maker has a very poorly constrained supply of other people’s money to spend.