From Reddit's Today I Learned

TIL "health insurance" was actually cooked up as a ploy by hospitals to fill empty beds. The real impetus to making insurance commonplace is when they made premiums tax-free if paid by employers. Before insurance the average person spent $5 per year on medical care.

Link.

Get rid of insurance, or at least eliminate its tax-favored status, and the cost of health care would plummet.

But that, of course, wouldn't make the medical establishment happy, so it won't happen.