This, once again, owing to the exorbitant amount of money spent on healthcare both by the public and the government. A lot of people seem surprised that our government spends way more money on healthcare than a lot of other countries and yet the system disenfranchises the vast majority of its consumers.

In fact, US citizens subsidize the healthcare of other countries as well. The money we are forced to spend on absurd medicine costs goes directly into making it cheaper in other parts of the globe. The standard for treatment and care is decided in the US at the expense of her citizens, and then it is offloaded to the rest of the world where it becomes cheap. Doctors from other parts of the world go to medical school in the US, once again subsidized by citizens, and then go home and take that knowledge with them. If other countries paid their “fair share” it would likely result in total medical costs going down in the US.

If you need a pill, go to another country. If you need treatment for an extremely rare disease there is no better place than the US (supposing you can afford it). This isn’t so much a complaint despite myself being a victim of the system, but rather the reality of it. America subsidizes the cheap healthcare of the rest of the world. This is why, on a practical level, a system on par with Europe in the US is fiscally intractable. To both subsidize the world and continue to lead the standard of treatment and care, the taxpayer would be on the hook for an absurd amount of money. I’ve yet to see an accurate tax burden calculation but I’d imagine it would be several dozen trillion a year, or around a flat 800-1000% increase in current taxes along with trimming the budgetary fat.