"Illness is neither an indulgence for which people have to pay, nor an offence for which they should be penalised, but a misfortune the cost of which should be shared by the community."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneurin_Bevan

NB Of course, it is perfectly possible to disagree with this view, it just happens to be something I personally strongly agree with.

> If that is capitalism

its certainly not free market capitalism. part of the problem is that the government makes it illegal to turn away ER patients. maybe you think thats moral or maybe you dont, but the point is that an ostensibly free market becomes corrupted with outside influences like this. you cant create a system designed for the free market to be the mistake fixer and then make the market not free and not expect bad mistakes.

i think this is the greatest failure mode for america: pretending non-free markets are free. in some cases, its the worst of both worlds by a very large margin.

I sometimes wonder if this argument is an example of the "no true Scotsman" logical fallacy. No matter how little regulation is imposed on a market someone will still find some example to point to and say "if only we weren't subject to such awful regulation the market would be free and everything would work perfectly".

The very concept of such idealized free market is a red herring. It doesn't exist in human societies (the closest is what you have between criminal gangs and during civil wars). There is no market in isolation from politics.

It's kind of like wanting to talk about electric field around a charge while pretending the magnetic field isn't a thing. Much like physicists noticed that electric and magnetic fields form a common entity together, perhaps it's time more people recognized that market and governance are just as much intrinsically intertwined. Either one needs the other to exist in any but most degenerate form. And both actively try to influence each other.

Agree, but I think that the US can decide for themselves. It is a democratic country where people (majority) have the power.

Largely when polled the people are in favour of single payer healthcare so what gives if you believe that to be the case?