Health care is so broken that I think it will unbreak itself.

You can eliminate most of the problem by mandating true cost billing by hospitals (get rid of their insurance mandated 500%+ markups to make it look like your insurance does anything at all besides make your care as costly as possible).

As you said, it's oftentimes cheaper to buy drugs without insurance.

The average person would quickly find out that insurance doesn't pay for anything at the hospital (most of the time).

~80% of healthcare spending is already at the tail end, and the state already covers most of that through Medicare and Medicaid.

The bottom ~50% of spenders (healthy people) only spend ~3% in total of healthcare (~$900 per year per person, about 1 month's PREMIUM).

Health insurance is a MASSIVE tax on the bottom ~3% of spenders (~50% of the population), when the state ALREADY covers the vast majority of people that need covered for tail end expenses.

Think about this: the MEDIAN adult in the US pays <$1k in personal income tax! Yearly health care premiums (that do nothing) are 3x that! 75%+ of the median person's true tax is going to health insurance that does NOTHING for them.

We already have the European model. Health insurance as it is is a tax. It just could not be designed to function more poorly than it does for the average healthy worker.

It benefits literally no one besides the health insurance industry which does not employ that many people, and is not strategically important for national security.

If the state completely covered the tail, and we had true billing at hospitals, almost no one would need or want insurance besides people that already have it through Medicare and Medicaid.