Saying "profits shouldn't drive health care" is like saying "profits shouldn't drive food distribution". Ask the Cubans or Soviets or North Koreans how well it works to remove all profits from the market for food. Profit is a fantastic motivator as long as there aren't all kinds of other perverse manipulations in the market. In a free market, the drive for profit means containing costs and reducing price so as to make your service is affordable for as many people as possible. But we have a market where the price of health care is hidden for the vast majority of the consumers, so health care providers have no reason to contain costs. Even if you were paying them an amount that was 0 profit, we'd still spend more than any other country on health care. And that's because we have a system where all market discipline to reduce costs have been removed. And as we can see, such a system leads to higher costs than even a fully government run system.
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