It's all kinds of messed up. Most states have their own internal markets with no competition across state borders. Insurance companies (under Obamacare) HAVE to insure everyone who asks, so they jack up the prices on the healthy in order to subsidise the unhealthy. They also have so-called deductibles, meaning the amount you have to shell out before the insurance company starts paying. Deductibles and insurance premiums have shot up ever since Obamacare came into play - in part because healthy people are choosing not to sign up in order to save money - if they have a problem, they can get insurance THEN, and in the mean time the fines are cheaper... this in turn means those who DO sign up have to pay more, of course.
That said... the fact that stuff comes under insurance means the prices are inflated compared to what they'd be if you were uninsured, or just walked in and asked to pay right there and then. Steven Crowder mentioned a back operation he had a few years ago (ie pre-Obamacare), with a cost on insurance of something like $11k... or maybe $2k if he just paid the hospital himself.
Oh, and in case all that wasn't enough, there's also government programs like Medicare and Medicaid, or the Office of Veteran Affairs. Not to mention a zillion exemptions under Obamacare, such as for Congressional staffers and trade unions, etc etc etc.
At this point, it'd be far easier to nuke the entire system and start over, but there are too many vested interests for that. Hell, the Republicans want to dump Obamacare, and yet they're finding it hard to just undo a law that's less than a decade old...
Whilst I'm glad you got treated quickly, that last point isn't generally a good thing :P .
Not really. The US hasn't been a good example of capitalist healthcare for decades, you realise. Medicare and Medicaid alone have been huge distortions in the market, plus the various individual state markets for health insurance rather than a single nationwide market.
A handful of links that might be worth perusing:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/p...egin-with.html
https://www.forbes.com/sites/chrisco.../#56533d764910
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...58-3-workdays/
http://www.freenation.org/a/f12l3.html
Incidentally, take a look at Canada some time. It takes weeks to get a CT scan or MRI scan, but your *pet* will get seen almost immediately - and yet the latter will neither bankrupt you, nor did it require a vast government pet health bureaucracy.
Oh sure, healthcare technology has advanced enormously since the days of actual capitalist healthcare... but it's advanced in just about every other field too. Care to hazard a bet on how much a Skype call would cost you if it was a government monopoly? Or an email? How many miles per gallon do you think a government car would get you? Now, if everything is basically cheaper except the things with the most government interference... why shouldn't that also apply to healthcare?