Note: I'm not saying regulation is bad. Just making the point that healthcare is really not a free-market in this country and never has been.
Arguing the converse would be precisely the no true Scotsman fallacy.
The original point, that it's not fair to blame the free market for the dysfunction in the American healthcare system, is still a valid one. A main point is that "shopping around", even for commodity procedures, isn't really possible. Also, there aren't many remedies for consumers caught in undesirable contracts with health insurers. Quitting a job or moving states to fire an insurer is wholly unreasonable.
The US healthcare system is extremely far away from being a free market style system. Healthcare hardly even crosses state lines. It's absurdly regulated. It's about as regressive in terms of markets as it gets these days. Over half the US system is government healthcare now, either directly or indirectly; eg heavy subsidies, SSD, Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, VA, numerous other programs.
Part of the reason for the vast cost inflation, is that the system has gradually spread out to cover a lot more people over the last 30 years. 5% of people are half of the cost in the US system. In a market system, if you focus on covering the other far healthier 95%, the system is dramatically cheaper - that's how it worked in the 1970s-1990s, and US healthcare was radically less expensive. 50% of people in the system (in terms of cost) are only 3% of the total cost of all healthcare in the US, you can cover those people for extremely inexpensively in a free market system.
By changing the system as they have, such that you commingle government and quasi-private systems, you risk dramatically screwing up a private market system and the government system simultaneously. Ultimately you can do one or the other, you can't do both at the same time and in the same phone booth where they constantly collide. You get the worst aspects of both worlds, which is what the US now has.
The Scotsman here in particular is a truly free market.
That depends on the country. Energy and telecom are quite free markets in many countries, especially with local loop unbundling and separation of generation, transmission and distribution.
And compare that to "Almost nothing is a free market" which you claimed. Now it's the opposite: most markets are free, but some, which depend on restricted physical infrastructure, are not.
Very different from your claim.
At any rate I’m obviously not big articulate in the time I have for here, so I’ll leqve it at that.
> in fact a huge fraction of the US economy is very much not free market
Indeed, many industries depend on highly limited resources, such as land, natural resources and so on.
You literally said: "Almost nothing is a free market".
The things distorting these markets in the US are typically nothing as simple as land, natural resources, etc... more they are policy decisions and politics. Suggesting otherwise is facile.
That really is the last I'll say on the issue.
What does "Almost nothing is a free market" means "in a broader context"?
We’re not going anywhere where useful now.