[ancap]

>But the healthcare industry basically NEVER met the assumptions necessary for a free market to exist in the first place.

Please expound on the history of this (the "NEVER" part)and also enumerate on what the "assumptions necessary" are.

>Just look at the way people on the right talk about removing Obamacare and letting the "free market" do its thing.

Obviously the removal of Obamacare would be insufficient to produce a free market in health care and it would take a lot more repealing of laws (many at the state level) before a free market could "do its thing".

>Capitalism has become synonymous in the collective mind with "don't make laws, laws are government interference and socialism."

I'm not so sure there is any majority which claims this. I find much more common the idea that most of society's problems are caused by capitalism, caused by a "market failure", or that free enterprise is insufficient to resolve said problem and the only solution is government action.

[themagician]

With the exception of Kaiser and a few other smaller providers, pricing in healthcare is completely opaque. Consumers can't make informed decisions because they essentially have no information. In most cases if you call a provider and ask what the price of something is they can't tell you. It's a myriad of "what insurance you do have" and "it depends".

[ancap]

I would suspect that was not the case 50 years ago. There are plenty of "medical tourist" destinations where you can go to get a very complicated medical procedure done and they will tell you exactly how much it will cost before hand.

From a U.S. physician's perspective, knowing what insurance you have is obviously going to be a prerequisite to estimating the cost (unless its one of the rare doctors who accepts no insurance). Different insurances cover different things, different providers, different procedures, different prescriptions, then there's the issue of deductibles, contracted costs, etc. It's a complicated mess, and while I don't know enough about the laws affecting health insurance companies and doctors, I would suspect there are regulations which exasperate the problem. Clearly Obamacare (mandating everyone have insurance) is not going to fix the problem.