You might not have realized how this monopoly was granted. It wasn't a free market decision, it was state sanctioned.

A state-sanctioned monopoly means the state did not interfere in preventing the monopoly in the first place.

The state forced these hospitals to merge over the objection of their owners?

That almost makes it sound like "the state" did it for fun and that money wasn't somehow involved.

I never understood the desire to be ruled over by private organizations designed to exploit you leaving you basically powerless to do anything about it. You aren't allowed to vote for the CEO of a billion dollar multinational.

Governments on the other hand are something that every person has the power to change and influence directly. For all the effort that has gone into making it harder for people to change their government effectively, we're still better poised to do that than we are when up against massive corporations.

The theory is that competition will solve the problem, if you don’t like one company you can go to another. There are a lot of areas where this doesn’t seem to work though, for various reasons.

Also it fails to take into account that in an unregulated system companies will simply collude rather than compete.

Healthcare is almost the farthest thing from a free market in the US. There are 35 states with certificate of need laws which allow existing hospitals to veto the opening of new hospitals. The US government sets funding for residencies and in effect sets the supply of doctors. In poor states Medicaid and Medicare are the largest payers into health systems. The FDA controls what medicines can be prescribed and for what reasons.

You’re not going to find any libertarians who have anything nice to say about US healthcare.

Government can do what it wants, and at a perpetual loss. At least the private company has to make ends meet.

Governments still have budgets. At the end of the day it's just money in, money out, except private healthcare has someone siphoning money in the middle.

There's nothing even remotely libertarian about US medical care. Find another strawman to attack.

Yeah, a libertarian would let you buy penicillin from a pharmacist without a prescription, so you wouldn't need an ER visit to see a doctor to get the obvious prescription written before next week.