I think people conflate two separate issues when considering health care costs in the US. The first is high costs. The second is increasing costs.
There is no doubt about it when it comes to high costs. We pay more than other first world countries for comparable levels of care.
When it comes to increasing costs though there isn't much difference between the US and many other first world countries. The US rates rise just a little faster than the rates in the other G7 countries, for example.
It's been this way for a long time. Here's how much various counties' costs went up from 2000 to 2018: US 2.3x, Germany 2.1x, France 1.8x, Canada 2.0x, Italy 1.7x, Japan 2.6x, and UK 2.6x. The US costs relative to 1980 were in 1990, 2000, 2010 2.6x, 4.4x, 7.7x, and 10.2x. For UK it was 2.0x, 4.1x, 7.5x, 10.6x. France did better: 2.2x, 4.1x, 6.1x, 7.5x.
Much of the focus on health care cost reform is on the high cost compared to other countries, with the assumption that we are doing something wrong that the others are avoiding and this is what leads to our high costs.
But our costs were about as much higher relative to the others 50 years ago as they are now. It is just that it wasn't as big a deal back then because costs were much lower as a percentage of GDP then both in the US and in the other first world countries.
In a sense then the US isn't actually doing much worse than the rest of the world (see note below). We are just farther ahead on the same curve they are all following, so we've reached the point where it is painful first.
This is not good. It means that fixing this is going to be a lot harder than most reform advocates think.
Note: when I say we aren't doing much worse this is just on costs. We are way behind in access.
Here are a couple of past comments with cites for the above numbers [1] [2].