I explored specializing in health econ in college. My professor put it this way - health care is a scarce good. There's only so many doctors, so much medicine, so many beds. You have to control access to the goods somehow, otherwise you have Tragedy of the Commons.

In the rest of the world, it's controlled by extended wait times. In the US, it's cost. You can have moral arguments about what's fair, but that's the economic reality.

At the time I as studying this (early 2010's), the average wait time of diagnosis to first treatment for breast cancer in the US was 12 days. In NIH, it was 5 months.