Comment by nradov

There is no US healthcare "system" in the sense of having a cohesive entity pursuing a unified goal. It's a bunch of separate entities each pursuing their own goals, often in conflict with each other. If we were designing a healthcare system from scratch it obviously wouldn't look anything like what we have today. But we arrived here through a process that economists call "path dependence", and this makes it stubbornly resistant to systemic improvements.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_dependence