On costs, it's super simple too. In countries who have a single payer system, the government is a monopsony or (near) single buyer with huge market power to bring down price of drugs and treatment. This is primarily why the US health care industry is so deathly afraid of a single payer system and demonized it. The final AHA, to appease the industry, had provisions specifically stating the government would not attempt to push down prices.

Insurance companies and union groups in the US are nowhere near as powerful because of their relative size and can't dictate price. At an individual consumer level there is also no competition because for those with work provided cover, the cost is hidden as an income deduction. Whereas those without cover get hosed with chargemaster prices and as an individual have no ability to contest high prices anyhow.

It sure seems to me that currently, unfettered "capitalism" is in full swing in the health care industry and what the administration of health care facilities truly fear and lobby so furiously against is the standardization of health care costs based on real world supply and demand, not prices conjured out of thin air from some mysterious Chargemaster grimoire.

The health care industry has no incentive to change the current model. Why would they? Could a CEO or executive board of a hospital get traction for disrupting the current status quo when it is so obscenely profitable? I think the answer is obvious that there will be no systemic changes from within the health care industry which leaves just one possible source for market correction: government regulation.

Leaving aside the argument about whether Medicare is more efficiently administered than private health care and actually costs far less money (it is), don't you think it would be a good thing to have a watch dog organization whose sole purpose is to analyze the "Chargemaster" and make the health care industry actually accountable to the free market?

It sure seems like "Chargemaster" is just a new word for that time tested practice of free marketeers since the Boss Tweed days: price fixing. Anti-trust law actually helps create a true free market and we are in desperate, desperate need of it in the medical industry.