Your answers talking about taking plane trips to get to other providers show that you are only considering the effects of these things on the fairly-well-off and up, and completely ignoring how they affect the poorest 50% of the population. This is not terribly surprising, on HN, but it is disappointing in a discussion of how health care and the population at large interact.
There are so, so many broken assumptions that go into your response here, from assuming that it's trivial to find out that a $300 plane trip would get you to a cheaper provider, to the idea that "the next town over" is a reasonable place to go when that's an hour's drive away and you've just been in a car crash. It's just not worth trying to address every way in which you clearly don't understand what it's like not to make 6 figures and live in a major metropolitan area.
> completely ignoring how they affect the poorest 50% of the population
You're absolutely right that there are some poor people that don't have the ability to shop around. The solution to this isn't to centrally plan resource allocation, it's to just give poor people money (UBI/NIT).
We do this already for food (food stamps). Food is also a life-or-death good, one starves and dies if they don't have access to food.
There's definitely an argument to be made to increase food stamps and also turn it into straight cash, but that's orthogonal.
And I completely agree. I'm 100% for a true UBI, but as long as that's not yet politically feasible, I'm also for other solutions we can more likely implement in the meantime (like Medicare For All).
There are so, so many broken assumptions that go into your response here, from assuming that it's trivial to find out that a $300 plane trip would get you to a cheaper provider, to the idea that "the next town over" is a reasonable place to go when that's an hour's drive away and you've just been in a car crash. It's just not worth trying to address every way in which you clearly don't understand what it's like not to make 6 figures and live in a major metropolitan area.