Healthcare in Europe is also paid by the workers, with their taxes.
The real difference is that it's 2-3 times as expensive in the US.
The real difference is that it's 2-3 times as expensive in the US.
Yes. Which may be caused by the same three issues:
1. Doctors afraid of being litigated by patients, doing unnecessary treatments and paying costly insurance.
2. Corruption and bribery leading to things like Medicare being unable to negotiate drug prices and doctors prescribing addictive opioids to the tune of billions of dollars.
3. Inverted competition: Hospitals run a for-profit business while patients will prefer the best and most expensive service they/their insurance affords them. Who chooses a treatment based on price when your health is at stake? Also, somehow, drug prices are much higher than anywhere else, even completely generic stuff like insulin.
Nobody looses, except everyone else
Case in point: see this video of foreign journalists expressing their views of American culture.
But simply the problem is that the US economy is brutally productive, so the price of every input (labor, raw materials, capital) is priced according to their opportunity costs. If the same labor could make something that would then lead to a lot of profit in some other sector, then construction has to pay that high labor cost too.
http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/show/rs-236-alex-tabarr...
(Other laws make employment less liquid, somewhat reducing this benefit. IMO those laws should be changed, but only with the non-work-related benefits increasing commensurately (UBI). (Definitely not trying to bolster the Macrons here.))