Yes, JK Galbraith coined the term "Oligopoly" for a market with a limited number of large suppliers.
Other markets are far better examples of oligopolies than the health care market, and their prices haven't risen at triple the rate of inflation. Aside from the fact that you only need two competitors to create competition, there are always substitutes or near-substitutes, so oligopolies, let alone monopolies, do not have unlimited pricing power.
In another thread, I tried to show that some lifesaving medical procedures have inherent costs that would put them out of the reach of many people without support.
That's irrelevant. As long as the expected cost (i.e. the cost times the probability of needing to pay that cost) is within reach, that's all you need. Financial products like insurance can take care of mismatches caused by timing or bad luck. Even with the inflated cost of health care in the US, it is still well within our means to pay for it (in fact, that's actually a tautology).
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The above costs would be reasonably similar for the provider in many countries. The administration cost is vastly different though. Upthread, I posted an analysis suggesting that about 8% of the cost is due to reasonable administration, and about 23% is due to excess administration and marketing in the US system.
Higher administration costs and marketing costs doesn't necessarily mean waste. It might, or it might not. Certainly, there would be lower administration and marketing costs if all car companies were merged into one. Or all computer manufacturers were merged into one. Does anybody believe that we would have greater efficiency, higher quality, and lower prices if that were to happen?
Also, a lot of the administrative expenses are incurred to comply with government regulations (from the federal government and 50 different state regulators). These are costs that would be mitigated if the health care market became more free.
They might if they are good economists* - you don't need a housekeeper, and anyone who can pick up a vacuum cleaner can provide some housekeeping job. I have a postgraduate science degree and would be unable to be a doctor without years of training - unlike many I do have the academic ability to be a MD. The markets are completely different.
No, they aren't. Doctors are a dime a dozen. Also, you don't even need four years in medical school, let alone many years as a resident, in order to do a lot of what doctors do. Nurses are capable of doing it, and indeed there are people called nurse practitioners who have an additional 2 years of education beyond what is required for a regular nurse. There are also physician assistants, who are similar. They need only 2 years of a special program beyond a bachelor's degree from a 4 year college.
If I have a minor illness, I could endure some discomfort, or go to a doctor, and I am not in a completely weak position. If, however I have something worse, then, firstly I am going to be feeling rubbish, which is not going to help my negotiating skills, and secondly, I know that I need the doctor, so they can charge as much as they want.
This is not the way the world works. A business which tries to screw a customer because it senses he's desperate or vulnerable will not survive long. Think how easy it is for a seller to screw a customer on Ebay or through Amazon marketplace. Then look at how often it happens (practically never). There was an interesting study of the
The Silk Road I read some time back. Even though the marketplace was online, anonymous, and illegal (it was for trading illicit drugs), the rate of dishonest dealings was extremely low.
The prices are still related, if the holder of a huge amount of West Texas Intermediate decided to sell at $1 per barrel, the price of other grades would fall.
If Toyota decided to sell the Yaris at $1000, the price of Aston Martins would not be affected.
That's false. A Yaris available for $1,000 would drive down the price of the cars in the same segment, which would drag down the price of cars in the next higher segment, and so on. The price of Aston Martins would most definitely be affected.
You need to take account of peoples medical history and their personal situation, Emily's Cat gave a personal example here
Should she have been certain that she never was going to want children, one set of options would have lacked a downside that could have been very important otherwise. This was not limited to consideration of only medical issues, but one that involved her assessment of her possible future family situation.
I think Emily's personal anecdote goes to show how insane our 3rd party payer system is. How could price not enter into her calculation? Wouldn't her decision have been much easier if one procedure cost $100,000, and one only cost $10,000, and she had to pay for it out-of-pocket? Maybe that was the true difference in cost, but it never entered her analysis.
As to your statement about price lists. Suppose you list the hundred most common independent medical situations, then list the price you think they cost. If they affect the options for other treatment (breast cancer treatment for a pregnant mother, for example) then you have a matrix of 10,000 treatment options, for only two of those independently occurring. But there is nothing stopping more of some of these co-occurring, for example breast cancer treatment for someone who is diabetic and pregnant. You are now on a matrix of one-million treatment combinations, and you have only limited yourself to the hundred most common situations. This is far simpler than the situation in reality.
A free market can handle the complexity of millions of different transactions and bundles quite easily. It does so in almost every other area of the economy. My point is that it is crazy to have price lists distributed by a central authority. But that's what you have to have in a government run system. And that system rather explicitly treats all providers and all services as commodities, which are indistinguishable from each other. It doesn't matter to Medicare whether a 30 year old orthopedist with no experience does your knee surgery or a 50 year old one with thousands of procedures under his belt. In a free market, the latter guy would get to charge more than the former, and some people (me for instance) would probably think the premium price was worth it.
Contrary to popular belief, I don't carry cost-side data around in my back pocket. Your reasoning seems sound, all around.