> you define action by any organisation, be it pharma corp or city government, to be ipso facto collectivist

No, I define actions that are dictated from the top down based on collective information (such as population statistics) to be collectivist. Of course not all actions taken by large organizations are collectivist in this sense. Nor are all actions taken by individuals not collectivist in this sense.

> It only takes one individual to ruin a good thing.

A good thing from whose perspective? If everyone in the rural village you describe agrees that something is not a good thing, they should be able to work that out at the individual level. If not everyone agrees, then on what basis are you claiming that it's a bad thing and should be stopped?

Of course individuals take many actions that affect others. But that doesn't mean you need to be "collectivist" to manage that. In the vast majority of actual cases, individual behavior is regulated by individual interactions with other individuals.

> Abuse of monopoly - a fundamentally individualistic behaviour, as I see it

I disagree. If a monopoly exists, you have to first ask where it came from. In the case of health care, it came from government regulation. (In fact, historically, this is almost always where monopolies come from. The original meaning of the term "monopoly" was a royal grant of the exclusive right to sell a particular commodity.) And what was the government regulation based on? Collectivism--a top down dictation of rules based on collective information. So abuse of monopoly is a consequence of collectivism.

Of course the individual people who head the corporations that are taking advantage of these government granted monopolies are acting individually. But there are always individuals who want to abuse power and take advantage of others. The question is not how to get rid of such people but how to limit the damage they can do. And collectivism does not do that--it does the opposite, by doing things like granting such people monopolist positions where their abuses can cost billions or trillions of dollars and affect an entire country, instead of them being limited to only affecting the relatively small number of people they directly interact with.

> You may have individualism as your highest value

I have said no such thing. Individualism is a value, but it is not the only value. Americans also value patriotism, meaning the willingness to make personal sacrifices for the good of the country. We just often disagree with people in other countries about which personal sacrifices are actually worth making for that goal. Our deep suspicion of collectivism is part of that: based on human history, we have a deep distrust of the idea that top-down dictation of rules based on collective information can improve society. We would much rather let individuals work things out by individual, bottom-up interaction, holding each other accountable for the impacts our actions have on others.

> Did you know that the public cost of the US healthcare system per capita vastly exceeds that of every other nation, despite Americans _also_ paying thousands every year in private insurance?

Yes. I just disagree with your contention that this is due to too much individualism. It's not. It's due to too much collectivism. See above.