The issue as I see it with healthcare is the the nature of the beast itself. When you are bleeding from the femoral artery, you don't have time to shop around, and you don't know when it will happen. Additionally, it is a rare event, unlike your drive for food.
But modern health care "insurance" also covers the payment of goods and services that do NOT meet sudden and unexpected events. A huge portion of the health care industry services chronic ailments. Hunger could be considered a chronic ailment--it is not urgent, but must be managed at all times.
The notion that everyone should be guaranteed equal health outcomes is a very seductive one, but once you start digging into the details it falls apart quite rapidly.
Falls apart exactly how? Seems to work fine in just about every country that's tried it (which is most of the first world). Mind you, it's not really the health outcome that's guaranteed (obviously that's going to depend on individual constitution, age and lifestyle) but access to the same level of care is seen as a given. In my town recently there was a minor scandal when a pro hockey player showed up with a game injury at a local emergency ward and went to the head of the line. The hospital had to scramble to explain that his injury went through normal triage.
You talk about bankrupting the public, but clearly it's the far more expensive US system that is bankrupting the public (along with providing worse outcomes overall). For those of use who have grown up with publicly funded healthcare, a fully private system seems primitive, barbaric and inhumane equivalent to having firefighting or police services exclusively for those who can afford it.
As for your straw man about a "fully private system", I made no mention of that, nor have I advocated such. I was merely making an isolated point. You can put your pitchforks back in the shed and put down your "libertarianism = somalia!" signs.
Our system is clearly broken, but the idea that other systems aren't also broken in various ways is naive. There's no silver bullet that will solve the problems of cost and access to health care, and that includes the extraordinarily naive idea of just making "government" pay for it all.