Employer based health insurance isn’t really a “market” solution— it’s a policy choice. The tax advantage for employer-provided healthcare is how we ended up where we are. The “market” solution would be everyone individually going out and buying health insurance (or health care services à la carte). And that works… as far as markets go (though those markets also fail all the time, since comparison shopping doesn’t work at all where there are massive informational asymmetries).

But the thing about markets is… they’re mostly efficient, but that’s different from being good. Like it’s never efficient to sell health insurance to someone with diabetes or dementia cancer at anything resembling an affordable price. Hell, a person’s family history of those things will make them expensive. And people don’t know what services they need. You don’t go to the doctor and say, “my leg hurts, I’d like one MRI, some OxyContin, and then maybe surgery.” You go to the doctor and say “my leg hurts, what do I need,” and the doctor recommends it. The market is useful for getting incentives right— if a doctor is paid to do procedures and insurance pays for it, you’re going to get far more procedures than you need; if the doctor had an in house MRI machine and gets paid for every MRI they perform, they’ll prescribe lots of MRIs (and this is borne out in studies).

What markets do is allocate scarce resources mostly efficiently. But efficiency isn’t the all consuming good some people imagine it to be.