If for-profit companies keep doing all these awful things, why people keep paying them money?
If either of those are true, their lives do not depend on those procedures.
I really cannot understand how you can even think about doing healthcare system for profit. Posting this from a Single-pay country, Germany.
In my armchair politics I do wonder if single payer, market provider might work. You get the competition of the market, but the tax payer purse. I think technically this is how medicare works but there are a bunch of nuances that make medicare not work (such as negotiation of prices).
I got a "government insurance", which is the most expensive, but also the one with the best cover. There is "private insurances" with cheaper premiums and less cover that are attractive to young people, but it's kind of hard to later in life switch back to the government one.
Most countries in EU have kind of this mixed healthcare, with private, and public ones with the only goal to make sure the private offer competitive enough services... Same thing with hospitals, there is public hospitals, so private ones don't jack up the prices to crazy values...
A lot of people are negative about how America does things, but as far as I can tell most of the issues stem from corruption via money in politics. Capitalism and Market Economies seem to work well, but Crony Capitalism and Citizens United seem to just be friendly names for corruption.
An extreme case of this (in some places) is the internet provider. If they know they're the only ones they can basically charge much more than if you were living in an area with healthy competition. What're you gonna do, not use the net?
As an explicit example, my wife took our infant daughter to a doctor the other day, because she was coughing and sneezing for a week already, and she wanted him to confirm that it’s most likely nothing to worry about. The doctor agreed. Insurance was billed $200, with $10 paid by us out of pocket. If we had to pay $200 out of pocket, we’d probably wait another week (and ended up not paying anything at all, because the coughing indeed disappeared before the end of the second week).
Most people aren't medical doctors, and most aren't gonna gamble with their health. It's a transaction where one side has way more information, less to loose, and therefore more power. Hopefully they use that power for good.
Healthcare privacy laws make it extremely difficult to evaluate the value proposition of care providers. You can't just, like, look up a list of their previous patients' medical histories.