Your “worth of a loved one” point is made worse by MFA. We used to play this game in hospital medical ethics committee I served on. You are given a finite amount to spend on public health care. How do you divy up the resource among the young, old, terminal, curable, value of a patient to family, community, and dozens of additional factors? That requires hard decisions and utilization bureaucracies, AKA death panels. In a private system, the total spending is not fixed by a government line item. If you think MFA will solve the problem you pose, you are wrong.
This is an interesting quote wrt the relativity of money...for several reasons. First, when did you have this committee? What would it have been like in 1960? 1980? 2000? 2020? 2040? Finite, huh? What gives you the idea that money spent on healthcare is finite?
The problem with your premise is that you imply if healthcare only has $1 trillion to spend, and the price of procedure costs X, we can only afford to do $1 trillion divided by X procedures. And once that trillion dollars is spent...death panels. That's not how that works, now, or with MFA.
A dirty little secret...We are basically using a MFA system now, and have been since 1965. The problem is our single payer negotiated an increase of 1-2% above CPI in perpetuity...beginning in 1965, for everything on the fee for service schedule, which encompasses almost everything in the healthcare industry. This has led to most healthcare costs rising 720% above CPI, and healthcare expenditures have gone from whatever they were in 1965 to 1/6th of GDP today, and tomorrow 1/5, and if left unchecked, eventually 1/2 or greater.
A couple years ago a poster came on here and wrote that we can't limit Medicare reimbursements because providers would go broke. Taking the relativity of money into account, how can that be? If providers are are making 720% above CPI, what expense/commodity has grown in price at that rate? The answer is nothing, not even close.
So what gives? The answer is that what we pay in terms of dollars for healthcare, is to the providers, revenue. And to assume that providers would go broke if revenue fell, is necessarily to assume that the providers expenses stayed the same. But that's not the way it works, because most of the expenses should be contained within the reimbursement schedule as well.
(Forgive me for injecting my occupation into the discussion, but I'll use it for clarity.) Imagine the price of corn is $2/bu in 2010, $4 in 2012, $6 in 2016, and $8 in 2020. If you tell me corn is going to be $10 in 2021, should I be excited? If you tell me corn is going to be $5 in 2021, should I be disappointed? If corn is $10 in 2021, we know you are going to pay more for corn, but that doesn't tell you anything about my income. If you say corn will be $5 dollars and I start screaming, "No, I'll go broke", I must necessarily assume I'll be paying the same amount I was for seed, chemical, and fertilizer as I was when corn prices were higher in 2020.
Because we understand the relativity of money and what CPI represents, we know that inside the healthcare system there is 720%(and growing) worth of pure profit, above and beyond the profits seen in 1965. Understanding this, and debating our priorities, is the key to bringing down healthcare costs.
For example, if we agree doctors and nurses, should be paid more than they are today we could set their yearly change from CPI +1-2%, to CPI -1%, and change their associated expenses to CPI -2%. That would effectively lower revenues (the total amount we pay in healthcare costs, aka bend the cost curve), while also increasing doctor's and nurse's income. 720% above CPI, allows plenty of wiggle room.
Edit: A shorter and alternative answer: I've never claimed that MFA is required to accomplish anything, but if you think privatizing healthcare is part of a solution, you overestimate the compassion of finance guys like myself running a hospital.