For non life or death things, it's still kind of, idk, what's a good economic word to describe "something you basically have to / will inevitably buy?" Your ar

For non life or death things, it's still kind of, idk, what's a good economic word to describe "something you basically have to / will inevitably buy?" Your arm is broken and was put in a splint. To get the splint removed properly you gotta go back to the hospital for them to saw it off (and xray to determine it's a good time to saw the thing off). You're gonna... shop around and compare prices for this routine? I mean, you HAVE to get the splint off or your arm will rot off, plus, your quality of life is reduced with it on. "The Market" is armed with the knowledge that you've gotta get the thing off. Even with a couple hospital "options," the hospitals and insurance companies can collude (implicitly or otherwise) to charge basically whatever they want for the operation. The question isn't, what's a fair price, the question is, how much of this person's income can we extract before they'll risk cutting the thing off themselves. It seems irrational to try to justify this environment when considering the needs of the citizenry. All signs point to methods of organizing healthcare that take as much power as possible from "the market" (which just means whoever can form oligopoly), be that by having a single payer system or by simply nationalizing healthcare.