That's exactly the point. They're not getting more profit from providing better quality. They're making more money by providing the most expensive service, because people don't even realize it. That's the problem with thinking the free market will handle the economy; it only reacts if the people know something's wrong. The banks almost melted the world economy down a few years back, because most people had no idea anything was wrong in 2006. And there's nothing that's going to happen, to give average sick people the knowledge to realize when their doctor's suggestion is way overboard. It's been going on for decades and it hasn't changed. How many years till the free market will change that?

People do get repeat lasik surgery. When I got it 5 years ago, the waiting room had lots of old people who told me they were getting it for the third time. My corrected vision is already fading.

Lasik is an awful example here, because it's a massive luxury; far more expensive than the cheaper alternative of glasses, and the average person who has a torn rotator cuff who needs to get back to work, isn't the same person that can drop $5K on a vision surgery to avoid the annoyance of glasses.

Lasik is also a terrible example because it didn't fix the market for people with vision problems. It simply offered a luxury to people with excess income.

There's nothing wrong with offering luxuries. But offering luxuries as the usual course of action, just because your customer is far too ignorant to know the difference, is how we run health care. That's why we spend so much more on health care, than countries that literally offer it to everyone. Someone else here pointed out that the US spends something like 17% of GDP on health care, while Canada offers it to everyone, and spends something like 11%