Medical care suffers from the same thing all heavily-regulated quasi-markets suffer from: severely restricted supply.
This results in:
- Insufficient competition
- High prices
- Low quality work
- Low quality customer service
- Low availability and hence queueing
People complain that medicine should not be a free market, and look how bad the free market screwed up American medicine but we do not have a free market in medicine.
If we did have a free market, supply would be allowed to organically grow to match demand, introducing competition and solving all of the above problems.
But we artificially suppress supply of medicine and medical services. We call it regulation, and sure maybe it’s got its reasons for existing, but the natural and predictable result of such heavy-handed regulation is a lack of supply, leading to a lack of competition, leading to a lack of quality.