Pure free-market healthcare is something nobody wants. Even now, the vast majority of people want to be able to buy insurance even if they have a preexisting co

Pure free-market healthcare is something nobody wants. Even now, the vast majority of people want to be able to buy insurance even if they have a preexisting condition. So we've already seriously meddled with the free market and we're unlikely to go back. And that's not even counting the multitude of other places in the system where free market forces do not apply appreciable pressure. For non-emergency, non-chronic health conditions, the free market is great. Otherwise it kinda blows. There's no competition for emergency services. You don't choose your hospital or ambulance or helicopter. You can't shop around--not that it would help since they don't tell you prices ahead of time. No competition, no prices, no free market. And if you want to change that, you have to regulate--which also means no free market. Not everything has a free market solution (e.g. flood insurance). But there are plenty of other systems in between these two extremes that work quite well. We don't have to go all-in on one or the other. I will agree, though, that the Frankenstein we have in the US is actually the worst. We pay more tax for healthcare than almost every other country and we get a lot less back for it than they do. And in addition to paying the most tax, we pay huge prices for poor quality insurance. And our prices for care are among the highest in the world. We could definitely do better.