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This is a bad faith rebuttal that intentionally tries to distort the comparison.
Here's the salient point you're trying to ignore: many other countries have lower healthcare costs and better health outcomes because they've prioritized investing in healthcare systems that work better for their citizens.
Government budgets are not unlimited and when your country spends nearly $1 trillion/year on the military (more than double the second-biggest spender) on top of a debt pile rapidly approaching $40 trillion, it's reasonable to question whether the people running the show have their priorities straight.
As Martin Luther King Jr. recognized a long time ago, "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
To which I'd add a point about socioeconomic death. Of course, that doesn't resonate with people who measure the country's economic situation by stock prices.
> It seems at least as likely to do with the incredibly high salaries we pay doctors.
Doctor wages account for about 8% of healthcare spend in the US, so even if doctors worked for free, you wouldn't even come close to parity with other countries in terms of healthcare costs.
Don't you think something is wrong when the cost of an emergency room visit in much of the country exceeds individuals' median liquid savings?
> And the fact that we use like 50% more healthcare services than a typical single-payer society.
This simply isn't true. Per Kaiser Family Foundation: "The U.S.’s higher spending on providers is driven more by higher prices than higher utilization of care. Patients in the U.S. have shorter average hospital stays and fewer physician visits per capita, while many hospital procedures have been shown to have higher prices in the U.S. "
I think it beyond anything that could be construed as honesty to call such advocacy "good faith".
Let the people have their stupid circuses. The actual cost of airshows is fairly low on an annual basis. The DOD is gonna make a bunch of C5s pack random crap around, make a bunch of pilots do training hours, make a bunch of NG units practice crowd control, might as well use all that expense to put on a show. Better for PR and for morale and for training that way (turns out everyone gives more of a crap about doing a good job when the public is there).
It's not just about the numbers themselves, it's about what they signal in terms of priorities.
Is it really so strange to question whether a country with $40 trillion in debt that spends nearly a trillion dollars a year on its war machine - more than 2x the amount spent by the second-largest military spender in the world - has its priorities straight?
The saddest thing about healthcare in America is that it's working exactly as designed. The high costs are a feature, not a bug. And large numbers of the people who are an emergency room visit away from a financial crisis cheer the products of a military-industrial complex that has produced enough firepower to destroy the planet thousands of times over.
Personal take-home pay for physicians is 8-10% of total US healthcare spending ($5tr). (or 20%/$1.11t for "physician and clinical services" overall which includes doctors, clinical staff, admin, and overhead costs.)
US total spending on pharmaceuticals is $1 tr; net spending on outpatient prescription drugs is $600b.
The DoD's total spending is $961.6b for FY 2026.
There's little argument against reforming both military spending and healthcare spending in the US, but (as Scott Galloway says) it's awfully hard to find a prominent politician who vocally supports reforming both these (not one at the expense of the other). So, the out-of-control spending/borrowing will continue.
Anyway, as to this crash, all other considerations apart, E/A-18Gs (electronic warfare planes) cost 60% more than F-18s. Who authorized flying them in an airshow?
One can acknowledge the necessity of having a military while at the same time questioning the magnitude of defense spending.