In the US, we ration by price… “the doctors expensive and I don’t feel too bad so I’m not going to go”. In Europe, they ration via lines… you’ll get your free healthcare eventually.
Either way there are problems, but seems like other countries might be onto something
It is an important distinction. For example, about 33% of healthcare dollars go to paying “claims proceesing” people at your insurance company and your doctors office to haggle with each other and produce duplicate paperwork.
If the low end of your estimate (5x) is the correct multiplier, the money that goes to claims processing would be enough to pay for universal healthcare in pretty much any other first world country.
Other things, like absurdly high drug prices, also are not healthcare spending. 90+% of drug discovery research money is spent at universities, and not by pharmaceutical companies. Also, those companies pay more for prescription drug advertising than for drug research.
Afaik this is simply not true, and even if it was, this would be misleading if you consider that most costs are made during clinical trials, which test the effectiveness of the drug.
This is not true, but there is a big non patient healthcare services culprit in US healthcare costs, and that is legal liability. In the US, every entity in the healthcare chain is doing so much extra to prevent themselves from being liable, and charging extra in case they are found liable, that it inflates all costs dramatically.
Without tort reform, I doubt we see much improvement.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make about drug discovery research. The major expense in bringing a new drug to market is not in the basic research but in the phase-3 clinical trials. Those often cost pharmaceutical companies upwards of $1B now.
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-18-40
By comparison, several major tech companies have significantly higher profit margins.