If a system constantly fails to do what it was intended to do, then we should consider that what it does in reality is its true purpose. Basically this is functional structuralism.
I understand what it means. I think it is a silly maxim, because it is unnecessarily reductive. Employer sponsored healthcare insurance wasn't ever intended to be a good system for providing healthcare to people, it was popularized as a workaround for employers to raise wages during the Stabilization Act of 1942. Everything that has changed since then has been incremental changes for differing reasons. The idea that a huge system like this even has a single "intent" is ridiculous. It is made up of thousands of different actors, each in different situations with different intents and interests.
But we aren't talking colloquially, we're talking about within the maxim. I'm trying to give you the benefit of the doubt, but it feels like you're doubling down in order to prove a point.
The maxim, applied here, is an obtuse oversimplification of the problems with the health insurance system, and the barriers to changing it.
Yes, if we could wave a wand and delete the fact that it ever happened, that would be ideal. But the problem is more difficult to solve now, because we have the problem of the health insurance system, and the problem of drastic systematic and economic change.
In my experience, choices to label opposition as either reductive or overly complex are largely rhetorical. They don't pass the validity test.
Perhaps we should ask borrow the "magic wand" that seems to exist for every other country. Maybe they can lend us theirs since that's apparently how realistic a system that does not bankrupt people is.
Sadly, it doesn't seem equally possible or realistic to build a system where CEO's aren't revenge murdered.
If a system constantly fails to do what it was intended to do, then we should consider that what it does in reality is its true purpose. Basically this is functional structuralism.