I never claimed it did. My claim is that what we call "health insurance" in the US is not just insurance; it is a bundle of insurance (coverage for high cost unforeseen events) with other things that aren't insurance, but have to be bundled with it because the government says so.
> direct primary care offerings exist right now.
Yes, they do, but they are hamstrung by the fact that the US health care system disincentivizes patients from using them. If all primary care in the US was provided by such places, and patients paid the costs directly, that would be a free market, at least in primary care. But that's nothing like what we have. It's certainly nothing like what Medicare Advantage, which is the subject of this discussion, provides.
> Healthcare, when coupled with a profit motive, offers misaligned incentives, period.
Not in a free market. Health care in the US before WW II was provided by private companies (or individuals like doctors with their own practices), for profit, and worked better, given the technology of the time, than what we have now. What ended that system was laws passed during WW II that fixed wages, which meant that companies could not compete for labor in a free market by offering higher wages. So companies looked around for other benefits they could offer to compete, and health care was an obvious one. And then after the war the government decided to regulate the company-provided health care instead of ending it and restoring a free market.
What offers misaligned incentives is the bastardized system we have in the US, which combines the worst features of for-profit with the worst features of socialism. The for-profit part is not visible to the actual patients--as I have already pointed out upthread, patients have no idea what the services they are getting actually cost, so they have no idea whether they are worth what they cost. The socialized part is what patients see--the services available to them are determined by their health "insurance", not them--but decisions are made by third parties who have no skin in the game and suffer no consequences when they make bad decisions that cause harm to patients.
> nobody should be getting denied a cochlear implant because they are deaf due to 'paperwork issues' for months or years until they die.
Of course not. And this would not happen in a free market. It happens because we don't have a free market in cochlear implants, we have a non-free market system with misaligned incentives, as I described above.