There are a million markets with information asymmetry and work just fine, and there are plenty of examples of cash-pay systems that work reasonably well for healthcare.

I disagree with OP that the problem is price transparency, but the healthcare market in the us is intervened in ways that prevent the classic workings of a market.

- Price transparency

- One price for the same service. The practice of charging $500 to the insurance but $10000 to the uninsured needs to stop. Maybe it's fine to vary by a few percent but there is no other market where the same product costs 20x more depending on who pays. If the excuse is that this is to compensate for non payers then let's pay for this from a separate pot.

I agree about emergency situations.

This is the exact point- you do not have the education to shop because you don't even know what you need to be shopping for.

Capitalists are perfectly fine with lack of price transparency or other tricks as long as it makes them money. They don't like competition.

What you are talking about is functioning markets.

In a free market, the assumption is that everyone is a rational actor that will work in their own self-interest. People that want to maximize returns are behaving as you'd expect; someone not wanting to maximize profit in a free market would be considered an irrational actor.

Which, well, there lies the problem. For a lot of markets, maximizing profit comes at a very human cost. For healthcare the profit incentive is to have as many barriers to avoid paying individuals as possible because their profiteering is orthogonal to your well-being in most cases.

This is also why many markets can be considered short-sighted because it's easier to make returns now than it is to gamble on long term growth, which results in smash-and-grab style of corporate takeovers.

Ultimately even if we did have price transparency for healthcare all of the issues would still remain. It just can't work as a free market and going further in that direction is just pouring salt on a rotting wound.

The only way you could possibly maintain free market capitalism is by, ironically, putting in rules preventing people from using the free market in their own rational self interest. Which is why I believe healthcare can't be fixed by making it free-er, simply because the rational self-interest of insurance companies is against that of the insured.

You can also the two, like in the nordic countries (or germany) where employee actually have voting power about the strtegic orientation of the company (actually i think employees are considered "owning" 30% of the issued shares or something like that). From a (weird) point of view, this is 70% capitalism, 30% communism.