With the amount of lobbying, financial contributions to campaign funds, oligopoly, the market isn't free.
This is also one of the market where you have to pay. You can choose to not go to vacations or not to buy an apartment (even if you live horribly); you cannot just not have an appendix operation or not fix your ankle if it is broken.
But wouldn’t a single “good” provider quickly undermind the business of the existing ones? Or is the entire thing rigged in favour of the current healthcare providers?
That was kinda my point. I can see why you’d do health like the US does, but I fail to understand why it doesn’t work in the US. In theory it could be much cheaper, but is the US seriously so corrupt that it underminds the free market that is values so highly.
It’s pretty simple why it doesn’t work. For most people somebody else (usually the employer) chooses a health plan for them. The employer chooses the health plan that’s convenient for them, not for the employee. The patient has no visibility into the contracts between providers and insurance. The patient has (almost) no insight into actual pricing. So basically we are pretending that this is a market but the patient has no say in any of the choices made for them.
It’s a market for employers, insurances and hospitals. All of them have vastly different interests from the patient and are passing on their costs to the patient . The patient is left with having to pay for somebody else’s decisions.
As broken as the US healthcare system appears from the outside, the free market SHOULD have pushed prices down, not up.