You're right, I did use the wrong term there, and in a way that encourages sloppy thinking. I was just trying to dispel the vision some people have of the population being ultra price-sensitive to doctor visit payments and are therefore just inches away from overloading the system this way if it became free, which I think is a common but unrealistic model of the dynamics of health care decisions, in particular the non-monetary costs of doctor visits.

And since you bring up the topic, the health care sector is many, many degrees removed from market-based identification of efficient production/consumption levels, in some ways intractably (because of public unwillingness to let people go without certain kinds of care on the basis of not affording it, for example).