hi csl,
I know you believe this. But the economics of healthcare works differently. Market actors efficiently figure out and exclude risks and exposure to costs and eliminate them. So they omit precisely the folks you want to cover.
This is why the pre-Obama system was seen as a health insurance model designed to cover everyone but the sick.
The pre-Obama US healthcare system was mostly market-oriented. Insurance companies were in competition with one another. It was also extremely expensive. Indeed, it was consuming the US economy as a percentage of GDP. Obamacare slowed the growth of the costs of that model, but not sufficiently to reverse the growth.
If you take the time to look up the share of GDP assigned to healthcare internationally, you will discover that government run health systems are much cheaper than market-based models. Compare the costs of the British and French government systems to the US insurance model.
So while faith hypotheses such as "the market is more efficient at allocating resources" or "the market will deliver lower costs and improved healthcare" simply fail the evidence test in the health market. There are plenty of reasons and plenty of records to show this just ain't so. But you have to set aside your beliefs and assumptions and look things up.
I agree with you that markets work well in many environments (although they are often improved by regulations that are invisible to consumers). Most manufacturing, agriculture, technology, financial services etc work this way. But health provision has different characteristics.
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