Sounds like you are looking at it from a consumer's point of view.

The US "market" is between the drug companies, hospitals, practitioners' groups, insurance companies, and government.

They are the ones that have market participation, the patient's not involved with that, their primary duty is to provide justification for the transaction.

>Healthcare doesn't function as a market, to our detriment.

So true, but even worse than that, the market that is there is predatory to a cumulative detriment worse than when simply dropping the ball makes things go wrong :\