Food is much more fungible than healthcare. The loss of any number of food items can be substituted by an overwhelming number of any other food items without the consumer ending up dead.
Healthcare is not as fungible. Most medications have single-digit or even no effective alternatives.
For an illustrative example and the flip side of the coin, water is a good example of where unregulated markets do terribly (since you really do need water and can't substitute it with something else and it's also geographically heavily monopolistic). Potable water production and pricing in all developed countries is heavily regulated for good reason.
The vast majority of healthcare expenditure is preventive or planned care, which is largely fungible. MRIs are fungible. Primary care is fungible. Antibiotics are fungible.
To the extent that healthcare isn't fungible, it's in very specific cases like end-of-life care, cancer, catastrophic surgery, and rare patented drugs. They also account for a tiny minority of overall health expenditure.
We can use different tools across both of those problems.
> The vast majority of healthcare expenditure is preventive or planned care
I don't think that's true for the U.S. Preventive care and planned care (if understood to be stuff like physicals, blood checks, screening, etc. including your examples of MRIs and primary care) as far as I remember is actually a small minority of healthcare expenditures (< 20% is a number I recall). I can try to root around for sources if you're curious, but I'm also curious where you're getting the impression of "vast majority."
> Antibiotics are fungible.
Not really. Definitely not in the same way that food is fungible. I assume you're talking about generics here? But generics again actually make up a startlingly small minority of healthcare expenditure costs despite making up the majority of prescriptions IIRC (again I'm going off memory but I think it was something like 75% of medication expenditures are due to medicines with no allowed generic alternatives).
Basically the places that you're suggesting the free market should best apply to are already the smallest slices of the healthcare expenditure pie (and also already quite effective in that limited domain).
Ah, I don't ever remember reading numbers for those so I can't comment on that (I'd be curious if anyone has a breakdown of surgery costs by elective, semi-elective, and emergency).
But even stuff like hip replacement kind of is on a sliding scale. How much choice do you have if the alternative is death? What about cognitive impairment? What about blindness? What about impaired range of motion? What about mild discomfort? What about pure annoyance?
Healthcare is not as fungible. Most medications have single-digit or even no effective alternatives.
For an illustrative example and the flip side of the coin, water is a good example of where unregulated markets do terribly (since you really do need water and can't substitute it with something else and it's also geographically heavily monopolistic). Potable water production and pricing in all developed countries is heavily regulated for good reason.