Good post!
Health care costs are high for reasons such as these (not all inclusive):
1. We're rich and can afford to spend more on health care.
2. Modern technology provides outstanding, but high-cost treatments.
3. With third-party payment, there is no incentive not to overconsume.
4. Tort liability forces health-care providers to practice defensive medicine.
5. Third-party payment leads to huge armies of paper shufflers who raise health-care costs, but provide no health care.
6. The health-care industry has been very slow to use information technology to improve efficiency. Partly this is because we have a large number of small providers who can't afford the investment, and partly it's because of Federal prohibitions on sharing health-care information.
7. The medical ethic is to do all that's possible for the patient, almost regardless of how hopeless the prognosis. (It is said that half of a person's total lifetime health-care costs are incurred in the last year, treating the illness from which s/he will inexorably die.)
The government is hard-pressed to address the situation because
a) There are huge numbers of people with vested interests in the current system.
b) No politician appears willing to challenge the assumption that health care is a right.
As has been discussed in other threads, Constitutional rights are negative rights (freedom FROM having the government impair your rights to free speech, assembly, religion, security, liberty, etc.). Not positive rights (the right to have food, shelter, clothing, education, health care, a job, etc.). Positive rights for ME can only be provided if the government coerces YOU to pay for them, thus trampling your negative rights (i.e., freedom from government taking YOUR property to give ME).
I don't think that many people, including FReepers, would want to see a person die for lack of health-care. If s/he can't afford to pay and no charitable person steps forward to help, a responsible government would see that the care is provided. But that's a far stretch from providing luxury health care to those unwilling or unable to pay for it AS A MATTER OF RIGHT.
Analogously, if a person would otherwise starve to death, we feed him at a soup kitchen, not the Four Seasons Restaurant.
So:
1. Align incentives properly (as with Medical Savings Accounts),
2. Reduce tort liability,
3. Use information technology to increase efficiency and effectiveness,
4. Minimize government interference in the health-care sector,
5. Increase the prevalence of living wills (whereby people refuse unnecessary end-of-life procedures), and
6. Provide government funding for only necessary care as a charity to those who have failed to provide any better for themselves.