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The US healthcare industry, in my opinion, needs more free market forces. What other service can be priced beyond the reach of 95% of prospective buyers? Most luxury goods don't come close to that level of exclusivity. I'm paid well and believe that I deserve it, but part of my job is the provision of services that are worth more to the buyer than the money they trade for those services. If your car breaks, you want it fixed 1)right and 2) cheap. If YOU break, costs be darned because somebody else is on the hook. The near universal presence of intermediaries who don't occupy a traditional buyer or seller role greatly blunts the usual market dynamic that forces the best service at the lowest price.

Health care is necessarily expensive. Healthcare as practiced in the US is too expensive because the usual market force that selects the 90% as good at 10% the cost option has been steamrolled by preference for the 101% as good at 1000% the cost option.

Casein point: People demand the 10x as expensive name brand drug and it boggles my mind, particularly when someone who spent 11 years learning why they're the same thing spends 15 minutes explaining that fact. Meanwhile, third party payors put a huge focus on documentation vs patient care. This is a huge cause for physician burnout, but only in the US. My Indian colleagues never really get over the difference in note wtiting here vs. India. There, a medical record is a document that reminds you or informs another doc of what has been done to and is going on with a patient. Here, it's a billing document, and the difference in time spent reflects that with our notes requiring far more time.