In theory I can bypass my employer insurance - but if I do I throw away thousands of dollars that my employer is paying directly and so anything I find elsewhere either cannot be as good, or is has to cost a lot more money.
The system sucks a lot, and for a lot of different reasons. Namely is that there's no room for individual negotiation, and there are dozens of pricing models for the same drugs, procedures, etc.
I fucking hate it here.
All of these are reasonable attempts to solve big, important problems and I don't think it's helpful to throw your hands in the air and say no one is trying to do anything.
In general the current FTC is better than most in my lifetime, that said, there are plenty of other areas of Govt that are really bad, and even the FTC and SEC could be doing much, much more. It's a mixed bag.
Contrary to a lot of replies, I don't think that another Trump presidency would be particularly worse in these areas as they are pretty populist in nature. Trump isn't a die hard conservative, he's really a populist first.
When it comes to improving systems like these, incompetence, hamfistedness, and inaction can be plenty damaging by themselves. "I will roll back ACA and replace it with [crickets for 4+ years]" is a worse alternative.
And even then, some issues are far more important and foundational than others.
We need ACTUAL SOLUTIONS. Changes to existing laws, or new laws. Consensus governance, not just executive orders.
They both suck, one side notably more so.
That's all.
In the US private insurance is the only way to go, and many of them are operated by people who have profit motives, even if they themselves work for an entity that is non-profit.
Since I don't have a real choice nobody tries to serve me. Complex billing and codes I don't understand - the people paying the bills like that.
This should be combined with a 50% domestic production and at least dual sourcing requirements for all FDA regulated medications and devices. Both for strategic security, as demonstrated during the pandemic and necessary given political shifts. It would also have the side effects of requiring licensure of medical patents as well as at least some more open knowledge.
Blocking pharma ads would help a lot as well. Unfortunately, pharma is the single biggest advertiser as well as one of the biggest political donation blocks by a wide margin.
I don't really see how blocking ads for things help, I also think they serve a really valuable purpose. IME Doctors are so stuck in their first decade of work (CE programs are mostly a joke) that there actually needs to be a forcing function to get them to learn about new drugs. If they start irresponsibly prescribing drugs then that's not the fault of a company advertising drugs that have gone through the most rigorous approval process that exists in the world.
People are generally over medicated and the drug pricing has nothing to do with actual costs for either research or production. Similarly for advertising highly processed "food".
No doubt this would be politically unpopular with the right-wing and libertarians.
Insurance points at providers and drug companies.
Drug companies point at providers and insurance.
Don't let any of them fool you, there are three heads on this monster and when they aren't busy blaming the other two heads they do a remarkably even job of splitting the loot.