> It's somewhat counter-intuitive, but if you dropped all government funding of healthcare tomorrow, healthcare plans would get cheaper. It'd also be total chaos, so I get why we don't do that.

But there are other things we could do that we don't.

For example, right now we have the expectation that insurers are going to "negotiate" with providers to determine the price, and then you have to use the providers your insurance has negotiated with, but who actually wants this? When you as a retail customer want to buy a pair of shoes or a piece of exercise equipment, do you call up all the manufacturers and try to haggle with them? No, they list their prices on their websites or sell them through retailers that do the same and then you choose based on who has what you want for the best price.

So make non-emergency healthcare work like that. Require them to publish their prices. Then the insurance company doesn't tell you where to go or negotiate with anybody, they only tell you how much they pay, which might be e.g. 90% of the second-lowest market price in your area, equivalent to a 10% deductible. Then you go to a website that lists every provider and their price, pick where to go and pay the difference yourself.

Suddenly they all have the incentive to publish the best price, because that's what most people are going to pick, and then you have an actual market instead of the existing opaque bureaucracy of corruption.