> More recently, private equity firms have accelerated this process, invariably with harmful impacts on access to affordable care, its quality, and profiteering, with little accountability

Predictable.

I am hardcore free market fundamentalist, but profit motive should not come anywhere near healthcare.

The healthcare market has the unique characteristic of having inelastic consumer demand - which is to say that you do not have much time or optionality to "shop around" for lower prices when you appendix is about explode. Instead, you call 911 and hope that the anesthesioligist on the surgical staff takes the same insurance as the ambulance.

So market participants on the supply side (hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, ambulance providers, medical device manufacturers, etc) have the ability to manipulate the supply side economics, where prices can be driven upwards in favor of the supply side participants, with little change from the demand side [1]. Read that to mean - healthcare costs are too high in America.

In aggregate, the US has the highest healthcare costs and nowhere near the best healthcare outcomes - this is why.

Wait, it gets worse. How Americans run the healthcare market is, in a way, a microcosm of American culture - short term profits, greed, self-interest above the long term common good of the community. IMO, the problems of healthcare are demonstration of American cultural values, and it permeates everywhere:

* corporations buying back stock over capital expenditures

* NIMBY-ism

* Fed policy keeping asset prices above fair market value.

* etc

Government intervention in healthcare won't fix healthcare. Instead, it will give you Obamacare. Fix the cultural values, and the healthcare problem (along with other problems) will fix themselves.

[1] There is a metric fuck-ton of data that supports this, OP's linked study is one.