On almost any other topic I'd be the first to agree with you.
But people aren't buying this kind of medical care voluntarily, and that throws a lot of capitalist idealism out the window.
In fact, there are a lot of reasons why normal supply and demand aren't quite applicable for medical care.
Imagine a person having an accident that injures them and knocks them unconscious. They don't pick the ambulance service, they don't pick the hospital they go to, they don't pick which doctors work on them, etc. But they still get the bill for all of it.
I use that ambulance example myself. It's a pretty good visualization of why we can't put all of the health care system under a free market.
However, there are parts of it that can be. (And even for the instances where you really have no choice, price visibility could still provide some cost containment.)
> But people aren't buying this kind of medical care voluntarily, ...
The subject of the article most certainly did choose M.D. Anderson voluntarily. That hospital is famous as a spare-no-expense luxury resort institution. They could certainly have gone an oncologist in any large city and got treatment that was nearly as good.
But people aren't buying this kind of medical care voluntarily, and that throws a lot of capitalist idealism out the window.
In fact, there are a lot of reasons why normal supply and demand aren't quite applicable for medical care.
Imagine a person having an accident that injures them and knocks them unconscious. They don't pick the ambulance service, they don't pick the hospital they go to, they don't pick which doctors work on them, etc. But they still get the bill for all of it.