There are no inherent costs to the consumer in eating fine foods.
There are enormous inherent costs to medical care. Most patients want to be treated with minimal pain, risk, and time lost, so they can get back to their regular lives. Their incentive is already, in virtually all cases, in the cost-minimizing direction.
When insurance companies instituted even very small patient copays on non-generics, usage rates of generics skyrocketed. Just having to pay $5 more (for a product that actually costs hundreds more, but is chemically identical) aligned people with their economic incentives and caused a massive shift in consumer behavior.
Brand name pharma companies fought back by giving vouchers to doctors to pass out to patients that covered their co-pays. Brand name medicine market share went right back up. Insurance companies have no effective way to combat vouchers and are forced instead to raise health care rates.
Also you're just plain wrong because you're applying rational thought to people who are in a panicked state. When someone has a health problem, they'll do anything and everything to fix it. We all value our own lives as effectively worth infinite dollars, which makes any treatment rational from our perspective. Society, on the other hand, cannot afford to be so generous.
You compared free high-end foods to free healthcare, which frankly just seems bizarre.
Nobody wants to use healthcare. Even when I lived in the UK, and I could have visited the doctor for free every single day if I had chosen to, I did not. Neither did I ever hear of anyone ever doing that or anything close to it.
Having lived in both the US and the UK, I haven't changed my habits. I visit the doctor when I feel I really need to. The only difference is that in the US, an insurance bureaucrat then sends me a letter telling me they're not paying up because <insert random excuse here>.
If you buy private health insurance, you're literally paying the salary of the asshole who pores over people's medical records looking for reasons to deny care (e.g. undisclosed insomnia prescription from 1982 as a "pre-existing condition").
The insurance company is paying his salary because it costs them less than would the care that he manages to deny. If he didn't exist, the insurance company's costs would increase. This means that insurance premiums would have to increase. Whether you buy your insurance directly, or it's deducted from your paycheck, or your employer pays for it in full, that increased cost of insurance premiums would trickle down to you in the end.
