So it might be the "closest thing to a fully free market in healthcare there is (in the US)", in that it's slightly better than the human healthcare market...but that's it. It's still nowhere close.
And there are plenty of other markets, all of them cheaper, and many with better outcomes...though I guess few countries with "freer" markets (since pretty much every other western country either has a single payer system, or has mandatory private insurance or similar, such as Switzerland), so I guess if your point is that having a "free market" approach to healthcare leads to worse outcomes in every instance?
So I think op point still stands.
You're missing the point, which is not about "economic value" (whatever you mean by that -- the amount someone would be willing to pay to save their own life? Their income?). The point is that no one who loves their pets dearly wants them to suffer, which puts the buyer in a worse bargaining position. I would (and have) paid many thousands to save a pet's life.
Being human with human desires leads to an ability to seek maximum profit, in 99.99% of people.
It ceases to be a purely economic function because people can't just walk away, and that has market effects that mean the typical pressures of a free market (such as 'supply and demand') become muddied. Sufficient supply is irrelevant if Spot is suffering -right now-, all the providers form a monopoly, and their prices are massively inflated.
>It ceases to be a purely economic function because people can't just walk away, and that has market effects that mean the typical pressures of a free market (such as 'supply and demand') become muddied.
Supply and demand has not become muddied. The ability to extract maximum profit is from the fact that there is very little supply and extremely high demand.
>Sufficient supply is irrelevant if Spot is suffering -right now-, all the providers form a monopoly, and their prices are massively inflated.
Sufficient supply and demand implies lots of agents supplying demand and lots of agents willing to buy, resulting in a situation where either party can walk away from the other to enable price discovery. If all the providers form a monopoly, they no longer act as individual agents, and hence there is no longer sufficient supply.
The dynamics of supply and demand and price discovery do not quite care about the suffering during the process, which is where the concept of insurance comes in. It could be provided by well regulated private markets with sufficiently well behaved actors, or by society at large via taxes, but the concept is the same. You prepare for unaffordable, unexpected expenses by "paying" in advance so that at the time of needing the product/services, you are not having to negotiate because the negotiations have already happened.
I think dentistry would be more or a free market. You don't have much of the pharma issue, staffing is okay in some regions, there is decent price transparency, and insurance is not as terribly byzantine as it is for medical.
Maybe that's less than what a similar (non-dental) medical procedure would cost, but that's still excessive.
tl;dr is that private equity firms are _so_ aggressive in buying up local veterinary practices (especially 24-hour veterinary ERs), and making already-fat margins even fatter, that the FTC is trying to stop it.