Without a means to offer enhanced Primary Healthcare to each citizen, community by community, that is equitably available, ecologically accessible, justly efficient and reliably effective, neither the cost or quality of our nation’s healthcare will improve. I offer a new concept as a means to understand the Paradigm paralysis afflicting our nation’s healthcare. “The Capability Trap: Prevalence in Human Systems” is the title of a proceedings presentation (2017) by Erik Landry and John Sterman (both at MIT).

https://systemdynamics.org/assets/conferences/2017/proceed/papers/P1325.pdf

As a strategy to for implementation, community by community, I offer a reference based on the research of Nobel Prize winner (2009), Elinor Ostrom: “Generalizing the core principles for the efficacy of groups.” (2012)

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2012.12.010
NOTE: Its easier to access by doing a google scholar search for David Sloan Wilson, Elinor Ostrom & Michael E. Cox in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization.

You are quite right when you point out that in the U.S. much of the population “cares first and foremost about Their access to Their doctor.”
In other words, they think in terms of what would be good for “me and my family.”

This can be traced to a strong emphasis on the rights of the individual in our history and culture.

By contrast, Europeans are more likely to think
collectively–in terms of “we.”
A friend who lived in France for a number of years
once told me that French healthcare is so good, because the French feel that “nothing is too good for another Frenchman.”

Unfortunately, many Americans do not feel that way about each other. But because the French do think in terms of “us” they are willing to pay relatively high taxes to ensure everyone in the country has access to high quality care.

In the U.S. we don’t think collectively, as you say, “forces opposed to change readily employ counterarguments to population-based solutions by applying often false, but effective, narratives that population-based solutions are an infringement on a [individual] person’s fundamental freedoms.”

But those arguments are as you suggest, “false.”
We all would be better off living in a nation where the population as a whole has access to high quality care.

If the poor don’t have access to good care they
are more likely to suffer from mental illness, alcoholism and drug addiction, which in turn, leads to
higher rates of crime, not to mention car accidents.
If they don’t receive good preventive care, they are more likely to spread contagious diseases. Finally, if they don’t have access to healthcare, they are more likely to be unable to work and contribute to the economy. Instead they become wards of the state, and the rest of us must support them, even if at a very low standard of living.

Can we learn to think collectively?
We did when we finally approved Social Security,
and later when we supported Medicare and Medicaid.

You’re right that those who profit from our for-profit healthcare system will resist reforms that make
healthcare more affordable for all.
The AMA stood in fierce opposition to Medicare.
But the AMA lost that battle.

Some who profit from healthcare resisted The
Affordable Care Act. But they, too, lost. (Some pretended to co-operate with passage of Obamacare because they thought Obama could never be re-elected. But they were wrong, and by the time the GOP took over the government, the program was too popular to be repealed.)

As a result, today, a significant chunk of the population that was uninsured now has access to comprehensive care that covers all essential benefits. That care is subsidized on a sliding scale,and insurers cannot charge patients more if they suffer from a pre-existing condition. If someone loses their job, along with their job-based insurance, they can buy insurance in their state’s Obamacare Exchange, even if the enrolllment period has ended. These are important victories.

Meanwhile, now that we have seen what Obamacare can do, it is far more popular with the public than it was when the legislation first passed.

There is no question that we need to improve Obamacare by extending subsidies to a larger share of the population, including more of the upper-middle-class. At the same time, we need to regulate what providers, drug-companies and device-makers can charge, just as most industrialized nations contain cost, while insisting on high quality, evidence-based medicine.
In the U.S. most reformers believe that we should do this by paying doctors, hospitals and drugmakers
more for better outcomes and significantly less for
procedures and products that cannot show evidence that the treatment will help a patient who fits a
particular medical profile.

Without such evidence, we are simply exposing patients to unnecessary risks without benefit. (Everything in medicine–even a test–carries a risk. When it comes to testing, the risk is that a false positive will lead to an unncessary procedure.)

Virtually every nation that suppports universal care
insists that providers practice “evidence-based medicine.” In the U.S., thanks in part to our emphasis on the individual, we let many doctors practice according to “doctors’ druthers”–doing what an individual doctor thinks is best, even if it’s just because this is just the way he has always done it, since graduating from med school 25 years ago.

Or even it means using a new, over-priced not fully-tested artificial hip because a company rep “sold him on it” and now it’s more convenient to keep on using the same device. This happens even when reserach shows that the device leads to more complications than another, older and less expensive hips.
(For this reason, some of our best hospitals are now
insisting that all surgeons use one of 2 or 3 fully tested artificial knees & hips with the best track record.)

Are Americans just too selish to think collectively?
I don’t think so. Look at Medicare, Social Security, and the growing support for Obamcare.