If the insurance didn’t create the atmosphere of territorial turfing, prices would be naturally set by competition. They would be much more accessible.
Healthcare suffers from several very competition distorting Economic effects.
- The so called “expert advantage”, which is the situation were the buyer doesn’t have the expertise to judge the quality of the service the seller is offering.
- That buyers are willing to pay just about anything to survive, so unlike pretty much everything else the upper limit to prices is incredibly high (basically, everything a person has plus how much debt they can take in).
- As somebody else pointed out, healthcare service provision is geographically constrained for a lot of things, the more urgent the situation the worse it gets, so for example if you have an accident and your life is in danger, if there is only one Hospital in town that’s were the ambulance will take you, so you literally have no choice.
- The cost and time to train medical professionals as well as of the equipment, means that for anything beyond simple clinics there is a high barrier to entry into that market.
Unlike the ideological pseudo-magical fantasy bullshit that some politicians spew about the Free Market in order to defend certain choices of theirs that benefit those who given them millionaire speech circuit fees and non-executive board memberships (namelly to justify privatising things that are in low competition or even natural monopoly markets), Free Market Theory only works for a few markets where there is a natural tendency for competition such as, say, teddy bears or soap, not for markets were there are multiple factors reducing choice and the ability of buyers to judge the quality of what they are buying before they buy it.
The second line doesn’t logically follow from the first - you’re talking about a relatively better option all the way to that top line and then you switch from “better than other” to “good” - it’s like going about how in a choice between being knifed twice versus being knifed just once the “just knifed once” is good in comparison and then jumping from that to saying that getting knifed once is good.
Even beyond that totally illogical jump, the other flaw of logic is treating each election as a unique totally independent choice whose results have no impact on the options available on subsequent choices - I.e. that who the Democrat Party puts forwards and who the Republic Party puts forwards as candidates in an election isn’t at all influenced by how the electorate responded to previous candidates they put forward in previous elections - it is absolutely valid for people to refuse to vote for Kamala to “send a message to the Democrat Party” (I.e. to try to influence the candidates the party puts forward in subsequence election) and it’s around the validity or not of risking 4 years of Trump to try and get an acceptable Democrat candidate in at the end of it that the discussion should be (and there are valid points both ways) not the hyper-reductive falacy you seem so wedded to.
Choices in the real world are a bit more multi faceted and with much more elements and implications than that self-serving “simpleton” slogan the DNC pushed out in its propaganda which you are parroting.