I don’t think you could find even one person who thinks our healthcare system is a free market system. If only we could make it a free market system I think most of the problems would solve themselves. Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s feasible to untangle the decades of junk laws. Instead, it honestly might just be a better idea to implement single-payer. At least the incentives mostly line up unlike 3rd party payer.

How can you have a free market system where the most expensive items are heart attacks, organ replacements, brain operations and other situations where you often don't have a chance to "shop around"? Unless we have price controls and socialized medicine like other more modern nations, our system will remain a failure.

People can think our system is awful and still not want the European one.

There is no single European one. There is a whole range of systems that are very different.

A lot of systems will work when the people involved are acting in good faith. And that is what's missing from the US system. US corporations and government have been captured by looters.

That’s probably the real problem.

What system do you want?

I would start by making all drugs legal without a prescription except in the rare case of a systemic risk. Antibiotics and super-bugs are one example of systemic risk. Grandma's heart medication, or Suzie's asthma inhaler are not. And of course you should be able to purchase those drugs from countries we generally would trust to create safe products: Canada, UK, France, Spain, Germany, etc.

Second, I would require that all medical products and services must have their prices acknowledged by the consumer before service is rendered. Obviously there would have to be some exceptions for extreme medical emergencies, but emergency care only makes up about 1% of healthcare costs, so that can slide.

I would disband medical unions such as the AMA, which spent decades artificially limiting supply of medical workers to keep wages sky high.

I would ban employer provided health insurance, decoupling healthcare from employment.

I would attempt to reshape the health insurance industry to actually work like insurance instead of total coverage. If you get the sniffles, just pay the market rate to visit the NP at the CVS minute clinic, get your antibiotic or whatever, and be on your way. Insurance should not be involved in that, and should be reserved for major medical emergencies or serious conditions like cancer.

I would have serious patent reform, moving pharmaceuticals to generics at a faster rate, and expedite FDA certification for generics. I would work to create a system of partner countries for healthcare certification. If your drug is approved in France, you get a greatly expedited process in the US and vice versa.

If those things didn't dramatically bring down the price of healthcare to a reasonable rate, then I'd consider some socialization of risk.

That's a pretty good list.

I'd like to understand why healthcare doesn't bill using time & materials plus markup. All current pricing seems little more than make believe.

I also don't understand why different people are billed different prices. I get that different providers will likely (hopefully) have different billing rates. But isn't billing different prices for the exact same thing illegal?