America’s health care system has long been broken. Is it too late to fix it?

By some accounts, America’s health care system has been wildly successful. Innovative breakthroughs have transformed care around the world. As an industry, it dominates the country in terms of employment and income. But that success, decades in the making, hasn’t necessarily made Americans healthier than people in other developed nations, and now it threatens to knock the United States off its perch as the world’s economic powerhouse.

The high cost of health care that has fueled the industry’s growth accounts for about 17% of the nation’s total goods and services...