> Health care is not a commodity. Different services are not interchangeable, and for anything more specialized than basic care, there may only be one provider within a reasonable distance of you that can offer it
at all, let alone at an acceptable level of quality.
In what way is it not a commodity? Does the medical practice in the next town over not have an X-ray machine or an operating room or whatever it is that you need? There are very few procedures that can only be done by one provider in the world.
Reasonable distance is also related to price. If the local provider is asking $10,000 then a $300 plane ticket to use a provider that charges a quarter of the price is completely reasonable. Which, if we had meaningful price transparency, would then prevent the local provider from charging $10,000 to begin with or else nearly everybody would know to buy the plane ticket and they would have no patients.
> Furthermore, at the point of sale, much of the time, the "customer" is neither in a condition nor a position to be shopping around. Sometimes, they're literally unconscious. And while some elective procedures and preventative visits can be scheduled and planned, emergency care is by definition not something you can plan ahead for to determine where you can get the best value for your money.
So have your city provide emergency rooms the same way they provide fire departments. What does that have to do with the majority of medical care which is not done on an emergency basis?
> It is impossible to have a truly free market for healthcare, because getting it is literally a matter of life and death for the patient in many cases, which means that by the economics of an unregulated market, the provider can charge them literally whatever they can afford to pay.
Being a matter of life and death doesn't break markets in any way. Markets operate through competition. It may be worth a million dollars to you to save your life, but if it only costs $200 then providers will be lining up to charge $250 and make $50.
Food is a matter of life and death too. Does that mean we should have socialized farming?
> So instead of trying to fight for a tiny baby step that will improve the system by 1%, let's fight the same people for single payer, a meaningful change that will improve the system by 1000x.
Because you can get a lot more than 1% improvement from things like price transparency or addressing existing constraints on the number of new doctors, which are easier to pass because for each one you only have to fight 10% of the incumbent apparatus instead of the whole thing aligned together.
Also because single payer doesn't actually solve problems by magic, so you still have to solve each of the individual problems anyway. If the FDA approval process continues to be very expensive and thereby causes drugs to only come to market when they're expected to be very profitable, how is single payer supposed to reduce drug prices without reducing the number of new drugs? How does it address the de facto limits on the number of new doctors? They're still independent problems.