It does apply to healthcare because healthcare costs are only inflated due to artificial influences. Health insurance, removal of choice of health insurance from the marketplace, government influence on that arrangement due to tax deductibility of employer sponsored insurance but not personally purchased insurance, and finally the expansion of "insurance" to mean a payment system in all transactions and not just the serious items (home owners insurance doesn't pay for minor things).

Government influence is what inflated healthcare costs in the first place by removing all aspects from true consumer choice (aka - the market).

And without the government, insurance companies can refuse to provide insurance to people with preexisting conditions.

What other product that people need can people not buy no matter how much money they have?

Yet in the UK government activity keeps healthcare costs very low by removing consumer choice.

Healthcare costs a hundred times more. That makes it almost incomparable. And has knock-on effects like different people wanting different styles of coverage with very different price schedules.

Courts/police are relatively straightforward and cheap, and act as an enabler for contracts and personal choice.

It's about 10x more if you count just police and fire; about 2x more if you count defense spending along with policing, using UK numbers. (Nowhere near 100x!)

Of course, many more people spread colds, cause accidents, etc than commit crimes, so it makes sense that the cost of controlling their externalities is more than those of criminals.

But your choice seems arbitrary: you couch it in pragmatic terms, because you're not categorically against government programs, but then avoid actual cost-benefit analysis, rendering your opinion nothing more than whim.

That's what it always seems to come down to with "libertarians": unprincipled bullshit that aligns with their whims (such as yes police, no NHS).

I would definitely not categorize defense spending as police.

Healthcare doesn't stop people from spreading colds. You're not actually reducing externalities with most categories of care. And if there were no police you would see a lot more theft.

Anyway, you can put it in cost-benefit terms, but you have to include a strong freedom factor. A government that takes 2% of GDP to keep public order is far better than not doing that. But taking a very large fraction of income to provide health care? That is an enormous cost to both spending and freedom, and reasonable people can see those costs as higher or lower than the benefits.

> Healthcare doesn't stop people from spreading colds.

If it includes vaccinations then yes, it very much does.

They don't have cold vaccines. And vaccines are part of the reason I said "most categories". Note also that vaccines are pretty cheap. They're far removed from expensive surgery and drugs.