You are assuming an efficient market. That would imply that patients have access to perfect information about quality and cost of care, and make decisions rationally. I find this extremely questionable.
> Monopolies are bad.
I am far from convinced that the US health care system is competitive in any meaningful sense of the word.
> I've never heard of anyone being forced to wait for weeks for this kind of stuff in a normal hospital in the US.
This is not evidence that the US health care is more efficient, it is evidence that the US makes a different trade-off in cost:quality of care. Without question, a subset of the US population receives better care for non-emergency medical issues. But also without question, this improved service comes with a substantial increase in cost.
Hospital capacity is extremely expensive. A Canadian (say) hospital operates at nearly 100% utilization, nearly 100% of the time. In order to do this, it must maintain queues for non-emergency care, in order to smooth demand. By comparison, in order to avoid queueing, an American hospital must maintain capacity to satisfy peak demand, which means it does not fully utilize its capacity most of the time. Both systems maintain large bureaucracies (I have been party to Canadian health care workers marvelling at how an American hospital might dedicate an entire floor to its billing department). Which is more efficient? This is hard to say. Do Americans have the freedom to choose where they stand on the cost:quality-of-care spectrum? It seems not, to me.