When you’re paying through health insurance, neither the doctor nor the patient care about costs as much. You’re both spending money from a 3rd party.
Conceptually, health care is cheap when you can’t do anything. When all we knew how to do was ‘set a broken leg’ there isn’t much cost to share. As we learn more and more about biology the more we have the ability to fix things, so shared costs can only go up.
Compounding this, include the (malpractice) insurance that medical businesses have to take out, that cost gets passed along.
I’m not for national health care, like the British NHS, but I do believe there must be a better way. Maybe AI can be a game changer(?).
Milton Friedman had a lot to say about that.
https://www.financialsamurai.com/the-four-different-ways-to-spend-money-by-milton-friedman/
The Four Different Ways To Spend Money
1) You can spend your own money on yourself.
2) You can spend your own money on someone else.
3) You can spend somebody else's money on yourself.
4) You can spend somebody else's money on somebody else.