Free Market Failure in Healthcare?

There are complaints even among self-professed anarchists that the COVID-19 crisis is proof of free market failure. There have certainly been issues in mask production, vaccine development, hospital bed availability, and economic turmoil. But if you think the problem with the US healthcare system is "the free market," you haven't studied the US healthcare system.

Medicine is one of the most heavily regulated sectors of the market. Certificate of need laws and other such legislation restricts the supply of medical care providers. The entire goal of the AMA and medical licensing a century ago was to restrict supply and drive up costs. The insurance industry is a state-supported cartel system colluding with medical providers to increase revenue. Medical devices are regulated beyond belief, and FDA roadblocks ensure innovations are expensive while preventing rapid distribution.

So blame free market failure to your heart's content. Just know you are deeply wrong. As always, the State is not the solution, just an additional problem. When you demand intervention by a territorial monopoly in violence, you get waste and destruction. Blaming the effects of corporate collusion with such a system on the market while demanding more such monopolization is either blind ignorance or deliberate malice.