what other goods and services? cause there's a ton of them that are a lot less elastic than healthcare. housing, food, water, electricity, heating, fuel - and most of them (or all, it varies by country) are matters of private business, not state owned.
I've already explained why food is not an inelastic good, and all of the others you've mentioned are heavily supervised and regulated by the government even when they're not state owned.
As for housing, that's a bit more complicated, because while supply is relatively inelastic, demand is not. What we observe with housing is that when real estate prices go up, the number of households contracts (in real terms: more young people continue to live with their parents; siblings are more likely to share rooms, etc). The subject of housing is made even more complicated by the way that prices have been inflated in recent decades due to the government's laxness in the face of permissive bank lending. This is one of the reasons we're in such a mess following the housing crash.
The point to take from this is that the market is not always effective at regulating itself, and this fact is particularly evident when you're talking about goods and services that are heavily resistant to changes in supply and demand, like healthcare.
the part where a massive amount of time and resources is wasted on unproductive endeavours.
when the person making the decision about purchasing something is not the person who has to pay the bill, then there is no incentive for efficiency anymore, which in the case of healthcare results in massive overprescription of drugs and treatments.
I think you'll find that overmedication is especially pronounced in the United States, where the healthcare industry is managed by private enterprise. I also think you'll find that most people (especially parents) will happily "pay the bill" when a healthcare professional can convince them that the treatment being offered is beneficial.
The question this begs is: who is better suited to decide which treatments are necessary and which are not? Is it the private companies who have a vested economic interest in selling you their treatments, or is it government agencies who are charged with helping consumers make an informed decision? Personally, I'm more inclined to go with the latter.
more specifically, the decision to purchase treatment is made by patients and doctors and is loosely regulated by insurance policy. cost is not a concern for either of them because neither of them pays the bills.
doctors are incentivised to maximize the amount of medicatio nand treatment the patient receives, because they are the ones getting paid to prescribe, administer and supervise it. this incentive to maximize prescriptions naturally aligns with the interests of the pharmaceutical industry, which is also keen on maximizing drug prescriptions for obvious reasons.
The incentive to overmedicate on the part of doctors and pharmaceutical companies is not the fault of insurance companies, they merely exacerbate the problem. What you're actually describing is the ineffectiveness of the market to look out for the best interests of patients in the face of the healthcare industry's bottom line, and it doesn't seem clear to me that the market is ever likely to fix this.
It might help if patients were more informed regarding which treatments are beneficial and which are not, but asking for such a thing is deeply naive. Most people are not in a position to make an informed choice, which is why we depend upon people with medical PhDs to make those decisions for us.
the bill for the whole process gets passed to the insurance provider (which, in the case of socialized care, is the state) where it is processed and reorganized. eventually the insurance provider passes on the costs to its customers - this is where the major problem arises: if the insurance provider is working in a market setting, it has a natural incentive to minimize this cost in order to keep its customer base - if insurance prices are too high, customers might think about switching to a cheaper competitor, or drop their insurance altogether.
Insurance in the US does operate in a market setting, and it is still much more expensive than healthcare costs in Europe. One problem here is that the insurance market suffers from a lack of competition due to the excessive barriers to entry involved, but this isn't something that market forces alone can fix.
A workable solution did come close with the Affordable Care Act, but the act was butchered with the removal of the public option. Had the public option remained, I think the cost of healthcare would have been measurably reduced.
but when you have socialized healthcare, this incentive goes out the window - because now the insurance provider is a state-owned monopoly, there is no competition that the customers could go to, and because the government forces everyone to be part of the insurance, they do not have the option of dropping out either. in such a system, customer agency is eliminated, and with it all incentives to act efficiently.
Why does universal healthcare necessarily have to be "socialized"? There are many forms it can take, and just about the only commonality between these systems is that the government is playing a role in reducing the excesses of market incentives which don't work in the best interests of the public. Just about every developed country apart from the US does this, and they have better access to healthcare than the US as a result.
I don't buy the argument that universal healthcare is automatically less efficient or less competitive. Would the public option in the original draft of the Affordable Care Act have reduced competition? Because it seems to me that the opposite would have been true, which might be why no insurance company wanted to compete with it.
