It’s easy to tell an industry subjected to the rigors of free enterprise from one that is simply rigged. One courts and coddles customers as businesses compete by innovating or cutting profit margins. The other is a good ole boys’ club whose powerful members can conspire to charge more and more for less and less.

Guess which one of these best describes the U.S. health care system:

As you can see the cost of medical care has risen more than twice as fast as overall inflation during the last 33 years. How fast is that? Well, if candy bars appreciated as fast, the 30-cent Kit Kat bar from 1984 would retail for $1.52 by now.

And the 1984 Pontiac 6000STE?

That will be $73,195 please, multiplying the original base sticker price by the medical inflation since.

I know what you must be thinking by now: how can I get in on this gravy train?

Well, you could have bought United Health (UNH) at a split-adjusted  six bucks and change 20 years ago and be sitting on capital gains of $162 per share by now. But what’s past is past and besides, passing through costs consumers would never pay if they had alternatives is less a technological achievement than a triumph of lobbying. They don’t teach derailing single payer at MIT.

Forcing Americans to pay ever rising prices for worse health care outcomes than other advanced economies achieve at a much lower cost  is also not a process that can continue indefinitely. Fortunately, there is a technology upstart out there working to control costs and relieve the growing pressure  on health care providers, while leaving itself in a position to profit from continuing spending increases as the U.S. population ages.

It’s called Evolent Health (EVH) and its pitch to health care plans and hospitals is disarmingly simple: “We can save you lots of money.” It does so by installing an integrated software suite tracking everything from health care outcomes and physician incentives to processing invoices for suppliers and insurers. Evolent’s clients commit to multi-year contracts (typically with five-year terms) and annual payments tied to the range of software services supplied as well as the total number of patients managed by the customer.

Evolent’s offering targets the “value-based care” segment of the health care market, i.e. the part where a provider like a hospital or HMO has a financial incentive to limit total spending. This “value-based” segment is set to grow much faster than total health care spending as more Americans qualify for Medicare and Medicaid. State governments administering these programs are looking to lay off financial risk and reduced cost with managed care arrangements that are Evolent’s bread and butter. And Medicare rolls alone are expected to expand from 56 million at the end of last year to 63 million by 2020, the government estimates.

Source: Evolent Health presentation

The market for software of the sort Evolent sells remains highly fragmented, and the company has made a couple of complementary acquisitions to increase its reach. Its product was developed by the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, the country’s second largest provider-owned health plan, and as such appeals to other large providers. Revenue jumped 57% last year.

It helps that, in addition to UPMC, Evolent was co-founded by The Advisory Board Company (ABCO), a technology and benefits consultancy with 4,400 medical clients. Evolent’s CEO formerly led ABCO. The third founding member is private-equity firm TPG Capital. The co-founders control just over 25% of  the economic interest in Evolent through a separate, unlisted share class.

The company isn’t making any money now, but neither is it burning much during this important early growth phase. Evolent expects revenue to increase 64% this year.

Evolent poses many of the risks inherent in young high-growth tech stocks, starting with the fact that the top three customers accounted for nearly half the revenue last year. And while a repeal of the Affordable Care Act no longer seems all that likely, were it to happen millions would lose their health insurance in the years to come, which definitely wouldn’t be helpful to Evolent’s growth plans.

But this is a bet that there is an inevitable retrenchment coming after decades of soaring medical costs, which now threaten to strangle the economy in the name of $1,000 toenail fungus treatments. Evolent is at the forefront of that fight, and will get paid with recurring revenue that’s set to grow as more Baby Boomers qualify for Medicare and managed care plans spread. Software-as-a-service has been very good to recent trailblazers like Ellie Mae (ELLI) in the mortgage sector, and Evolent has that sort of upside. We’re adding EVH to the portfolio with a buy limit of $26.