So how much did the elderly person have to pay?
Zero, right. Maybe a small "co-pay".
You will never fix health care when the person buying the service doesn't care what it costs.
Lasik and plastic surgery have both come down in cost, even after adjusting for inflation. Neither one is covered by insurance.
In all other industrialize nations there is a third party payer, just as in the U.S.; yet costs are half as high, or less. Therefore I believe your observation goes only partway to explain the extraordinary cost of medical care in the U.S. And although your observation re plastic surgery and Lasik would seem to support your argument, the presence or absence of a third party payer can not be the primary difference because, as I have pointed out, there is a third party payer in all other countries; yet costs of both regular medical care and optional procedures are much lower elsewhere.
Of course there are multiple factors at play. In the U.S. for example, regulatory capture is significant. There is one factor behind much of medical pricing, however, that regardless of country, if allowed to, will dominate all the other factors affecting price. And this is the inherent inelasticity of pricing for many medical procedures. That is to say, the buyer is not free to walk, so there can't be a two way market.
Whereas many U.S. politicians play deaf and dumb when it comes to recognizing inelasticity in medical pricing, this is not so in other countries. All other industrialized nations except the U.S. have solved the inelasticity problem by giving the government monopoly power to dictate prices. As a result, all other countries have drastically lower medical costs ;
yet results are much better everywhere else.* Obviously you, in general, get far less than you pay for in the U.S.!!!
In the case of plastic surgery and lasik you are observing what happens when there is a two-way market.
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*Check out the WHO rankings if you question this.
