Economic "laws" are a mixture of gross simplifications and statistical kludges, all of which describe patterns of behavior within some domain of limited paramet

Economic "laws" are a mixture of gross simplifications and statistical kludges, all of which describe patterns of behavior within some domain of limited parameters, at some scale of detail and timespan. Of course, the same can be said for pretty much any scientific principle! To expect a law of economics to hold in any arbitrary market is like expecting Kepler's laws of planetary motion to hold for any possible configuration of bodies. Whether a given law holds in the health care market, and why that may or may not be the case, is another matter, and a very complicated question to boot. The only thing that can be safely assumed is that anyone offering a pat, simple answer ("we need the government to do X so that the market will Y!") is oversimplifying.