Is the COVID Pandemic legacy simply more of the same.

 Is the COVID pandemic legacy going to be more of the same?

The is the picture painted by Ed Yong writing in The Atlantic  Sept 30,2022

Quoting from Yong's essay-Covid is on track to kill about 100,000 American a year with 50,000 new infections  daily .US accounts for 16% of global Covid cases having only 4% of the world's population.The country that helped create vaccines in record time is 67th in the world in vaccinations,

The public health infra-structure  was not sufficiently strong to do battle with covid and now, if anything, it may be weaker at least to the degree that significant  numbers of Public health workers  ( physicians and others) have left the field in part because of the vitriolic attacks  by the most radical of the anti vaccination activists.  

I have read that at least part of Hayek's defense of free markets was pragmatic- it worked better, much better in some regards than central planning. But are there circumstance in which free markets do not perform well at all. Is health care delivery one of those exceptions?

 Is the US hybrid health care mixture of private enterprise and government spending and government controls  plus increasing control of medical practice by non physicians ( let alone  venture capital getting its paws in the medical tent) incapable of  getting the job done. Prior to Covid I would have thought that our current system (or current situation) would handle things well. But it did not. 

Two things in the last several years have shaken the priors I had regarding the value of free markets and the harmful effect of governmental control. 1) the Covid pandemic  2) A 10 month journey into the other side of  medicine as practiced in a large "not for profit" hospital system  with  its bureaucratic  delays  and its tendency to damage the doctor patient relationship and the outrageous charges . The corporate practice doctrine has been virtually destroyed and at least 70 % of the physicians in the country are in effect salaried employees even though the mumbo jumbo of their contracts with the hospital and other entities would pretend that is not the case.