[nescioquid]

The critique is perhaps not relevant here, since it suffices to say that the country's wealth can afford a health care system not held together by "spit and twine", irrespective of how that wealth is presently apportioned. The wealth gap is, as you say, enormous.

In fact, the wealth gap is but a reflection of the underlying cause of the problem: legislators corrupted to the interests of the donor class at severe cost to the actual constituents of those legislators.