At one point in time, the HMO pioneer Group Health was a startup of a sort.
One never hears about someone going bankrupt from paying for medical care in Japan. They have a lot of regulations on what you can charge for health care.
1. You are currently barred by the state from doing this.
2. Your negotiating power as an individual is greater than that of the private insurance companies who are already doing this?
You can complain all you like about the cost of healthcare, but I think it's economics not legislation that is preventing you from getting a better rate.
Concerning 1), many useful practices which would lower cost are barred by the state.
Some states (e.g. NY) ban catastrophic-only health insurance.
All states ban me from self-medicating (which is actually not very hard to do for simple illnesses). I'm also barred from buying lab tests without first paying a doctor for permission.
Women are required to pay a doctor for permission to buy birth control.
I'm banned from visiting someone with less training than a doctor to receive treatment for simple ailments.
Of course, I'll be the first to admit that Baumol's cost disease plays an important role too, as well as higher costs for newer treatments.
The easy problems in medicine are vastly easier than programming. You don't need a doctor to solve them for you, all you need is his permission to implement the well known solution.
If you have an Iranian girlfriend, all you need is for her to smuggle you bootleg medicine when she visits her family. That's what I did.
At one point in time, the HMO pioneer Group Health was a startup of a sort.
One never hears about someone going bankrupt from paying for medical care in Japan. They have a lot of regulations on what you can charge for health care.