The systemic failure of the healthcare system is that doctors and patients can conspire to get whatever treatment (five tests, two exploratory surgeries, etc) they want and the hospitals and insurance providers, in the medium term, have no choice but to cover it.
As long as that system is inherently open ended, the additional element of human imagination enters the system. Humans will never stop inventing new treatments, interventions and drugs to supply the market of doctor/patient collusion. The price of medical care will keep going up, except where institutions, such as Wal Mart, are big enough to put a cap on it and make the patients pay for part of it.
Look at Medicare. When we old folk on medicare want more treatment, we demand it, our doctors give it to us and we put in the time to fight the bureaucracy until we get it paid for. No one has figured out how to control medicare costs effectively.
The same is true for the finance system. Wall Street financial sales organizations never stop inventing new financial instruments (human imagination is unlimited), usually on the back of the back of an existing instrument so it can be sold a second and third time.... (1) a package of bank generated loans, (2) traunched (3) with puts and calls around them and (4) insurance on top. Other investment institutions keep buying these imaginative instruments and regulators never understand what is happening to the stability in the system.
The stability of the financial system is supposed to be controlled with capital minimums and market reporting. But the market price of the new instruments becomes invisible and the relationship to capital becomes unknown.
These two systems can only be fixed by separating off the open-imaginative part from the core functioning part.