I don't think that health care is a market. Sure, you can take your headache or buy a pill, but you cannot choose to have a life-saving procedure or not, less e

I don't think that health care is a market. Sure, you can take your headache or buy a pill, but you cannot choose to have a life-saving procedure or not, less even compare prices (really). Further, if you spread the risk of getting ill across a whole nation, paying for health insurance gets cheaper for each individual. You cannot have that with a health care market. Anyways, your questions concerning sustainability are valid. There's a catalog about how much health care providers get from insurance companies for each procedure. I don't know who sets up that catalog or how it is negotiated, though. Recently, a (small) fee has been added which you have to pay once per quarter if you visit a doctor. Further, you have to pay a small amount (~$5) for each medication you buy (unless you need a lot of it). So, people don't visit the doctor and buy medication that easily (anymore). People who have not paid into the system are only treated for acutely life-threatening symptoms (and even then have to pay for themselves). To pay into the system, you usually need to have a job, so it's not something that you can just do once you see you have a costly illness.