It's been incredibly bad for at least ~3 decades. A sick person with insurance without a dedicated advocate (relative or friend) watching out for them non-stop will likely end up having several care screw-ups occur to them, and with a bill ludicrously rather than just insanely large and probably a few things in collections (even if they can pay them) if said advocate doesn't spend a couple hundred hours fighting insurance and hospital billing and mailing regulators and wrestling a mountain of paperwork and bills.
Watched this process with sick relatives in the 90s, and it was already fucked-up then. Gone through it with my wife's 3 pregnancies and a couple family illnesses in the last 5ish years. Same thing. It's a broken, evil system that ruthlessly exploits and crushes anyone without the time, wits, and wherewithal to fight it every step, and it has been for a long time. I think what changed is we have much better exposure to what it's like elsewhere, so more of us are aware that there is no reason whatsoever to keep hurting people this way.
In general, you can always skip the whole gov't funded healthcare system to get a particular private service at a full cost, and some (though not most, depends on the specialty - plastic surgery will but trauma neurosurgery won't) of the top docs will work in this manner.
Other than that, the patient-doctor match gets mostly allocated on the basis of location and narrow specialty, or with limited availability; e.g. if you want a particular popular doc, then (s)he might have a queue, so you either wait when they become available or pick someone else.
Look at what other OECD states spend per capita. Compare to how much the US spends per capita. For a real WTF look at how much public money the US already spends per capita. This is all a google away. The safe bet based on available data would be that moving our system to be more similar to any of those used by other OECD states would significantly reduce our spending while having little effect on health outcomes.
It's possible some other reforms that differ radically from those systems would improve things, and maybe even be better than anything other OECD states do, but since we have a wealth of real-world data about how the existing systems work and only speculation about most others, it's a much safer move to base reforms on the ones that are observably better than ours in the real world.
Watched this process with sick relatives in the 90s, and it was already fucked-up then. Gone through it with my wife's 3 pregnancies and a couple family illnesses in the last 5ish years. Same thing. It's a broken, evil system that ruthlessly exploits and crushes anyone without the time, wits, and wherewithal to fight it every step, and it has been for a long time. I think what changed is we have much better exposure to what it's like elsewhere, so more of us are aware that there is no reason whatsoever to keep hurting people this way.