Doesnt single payer "solve" this by having negotiating power. As a provider, You can choose not to take it but you are keeping yourself out of 95% of the market.
Medicare for All would preempt the lack of price transparency: participating doctors get what the government says they will receive. Period. They can opt out and only serve non-M4A payees, but that will shrink their customer pool. Healthcare spending would plummet across the board.
The U.S. healthcare industry operates outside of the capitalist system. We can either try to make it more market-based, or, acknowledging the high value of life and astronomical bargaining power of medical practitioners in wealthy nations, we can socialize the provision of necessary healthcare. Almost every other developed nation has done this successfully.
Engineer: I will charge X for this project because that’s what competitive projects of equal value go for.
Gas station owner: I charge $1 for a Hershey’s bar because that’s what the convenience store next door charges for a Hershey’s bar, and my customers can just bail or hop over there if I charge too much.
Hospital/Surgeon/Doctor/Pharma exec: Well, it’s complicated. You know there are insurance companies and PBMs, they’re the real villains, what can I do? Look, let me ask you, what’s the value of life? We charge a small portion of that. Do you really want to cut back on something so vital? We save lives, respect our profession. Feel free to go to my competition, they will all tell you the same thing. Stop trying to haggle like we’re spice merchants at the Grand Bazaar.
(Of course, thousands of medical practitioners support socialized medicine, the above is simply a generalization used to illustrate my points on price transparency, crony non-capitalism, and bargaining power)
No it's not. Medical care is a process people don't want to go through to make them healthy.
> When it's 100% free, you have no disincentive to use it.
1. that's just plain bullshit, as demonstrated by the NHS and other single-payer free-at-point-of-use systems, people don't hang out at their GPs office just because it's free
2. you actually want to incentivise people to use medical system preventively, it's way cheaper than having to use them curatively
> So if you want to have the government pay 100% of all medical bills and do nothing to prevent using it, you'll have never-ending increases is costs.
Literally every other healthcare system is cheaper than america's, despite the US healthcare system being by far the one most disincentivising use.
As a sibling comment noted, this doesn't happen in countries where there are existing single payer systems, so your analysis is trivially disproven by example.
Additionally, this presumes the content of "the laws of supply and demand" -- what's the nature of supply when consumers cannot choose between competing providers? What's the nature of demand for a product that people require to survive? These are not standard parameters, and to assert that they can be understood with simple demand curves is disingenuous at best.