The US spends more dollars per person on government health care than dem socialist countries lol. Source: Ezra Klein. On my phone so I can't link to the chartz.
Several reasons for this:
#1: The government is forbidden from negotiating for lower prices with pharmaceuticals. It has less bargaining power with local pharmaceuticals than local insurance companies, foreign insurance companies, and foreign governments do. And that is because conservatives philosophically opposed to the concept of "big government" have self-restricted their own program, making it the worst, rather than the best, it can be. It is actually cheaper for the US government if Canadian and European companies and governments buy american pharmaceuticals, and then the US government re-imports the medicine by purchasing them directly from foreign governments and pays the shipping costs to send them across the ocean and go through customs. Unfortunately, conservatives banned that, too. So the only way for the US government to participate is to buy things in larger volumes and at higher unit prices than everyone else.
#2: The high cost of health care disuades people from pursuing preventative health care and increases the use of high-expense emergency services.
#3: We view mental health problems as attitude issues rather than medical problems. Only the east asian countries
#4: Instead of pooling individuals together, we segregative people into different pools based on employment status, age, physical/mental deficiences that affect their participation in the labor pool, and economic status. The more groups you segregate people into, and the more these groups differ, the more you increase costs and magnify, rather than reduce, the influence of risk.
#5: Rather than restricting the prices from the supply side or requiring justification for price increases, we attempt to increase participation on the demand side by subsidizeing the supply side costs, and we do so based on usage rather than need.
It's like the opposite of how insurance is supposed to work conceptually.