Healthcare in the US hasn't been free-market for a long time. Ironically, it's probably most like the thing free markets were "designed" to fix than anything el

Healthcare in the US hasn't been free-market for a long time. Ironically, it's probably most like the thing free markets were "designed" to fix than anything else - things called "royal patents". What this works out to in reality, divested of all the religious narrative, is that free markets are better than what were called "royal patents". This goes directly back to Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" and SFAIK, nobody's really improved on it. "Wealth of Nations" was an expansion on economics from his "Theory of Moral Sentiments". I would submit that a reasonable comparison between the U.K. and the U.S. is vanishingly close to impossible. Especially with the NHS; that was formed after the War when the country was in pretty poor shape. People had trouble getting 1500 calories a day. In the US around the same time, we ensconced employer based insurance. That was fine so long as large, monolithic corporations ruled. The people you are probably decrying the most are those who hold that the Efficient Markets Hypothesis ( see, it's not even a theory yet ) always holds no matter what. We dunno. Modulo the EMH, free markets generally perform better. The only debate is whether or not health care is a public good. SFAIK, that is unsettled, too.