I asked ChatGPT of course, and the response roughly corresponded to my expectations so I went no further. Doctors make way more here than elsewhere (British doctors aren’t making 500-750k a year), pharma makes most of its money here, and hospitals charge an arm and a leg - it all checks out, no? Alternatively, if insurance were straight up responsible for doubling health care costs in any easily attributable way, we could easily get rid of it and would have done so by now. The only reason it can continue to exist is that it occupies a no-man’s land of utility.