I'm glad your healthcare was not so overpriced that it's not worth it. That's a bleak statement to have to make. Suppose we built a Byzantine system around foo

I'm glad your healthcare was not so overpriced that it's not worth it. That's a bleak statement to have to make. Suppose we built a Byzantine system around food like we do for prescription drugs. Food can be powerful medicine after all ... so imagine if you needed a nutritionist to prescribe specific foods in specific quantities. When you go to the grocery store, you're not allowed to just pick whatever, and you don't find out the cost of anything until weeks later. Grocery billing specialists send endless documents back and forth. Everyone in this society spends twice as large a portion of their income on food as their peers in other countries, but the food is worse. Food becomes so expensive and costs are so unpredictable that employers provide grocery insurance benefits that pull down the salaries they can pay. But when you're hungry, you need to eat so of course you "value the food you've received recently more than the price you paid for it". Does the fact that a hungry person with no options will pay a lot to not continue being hungry really imply that the high prices in this system match high value being delivered? Or can we perhaps recognize that the value being provided (food to be eaten) is similar to the food-value provided at much lower cost in other systems, and therefore the high prices in this system do not imply that its services are especially valuable?