Why is health care so expensive in the U.S.?

It seems inquiring minds want to know, and rightly so. In fact, we spend about twice as much on medical goods and services as the average wealthy country (defined for most purposes as members of the OECD), and something like three times as much as Japan, but we also have the lowest life expectancy of all those countries, and Japan, that spends the least on so-called health care, has the highest.

WTF is going on here? We can usefully decompose the issue into four parts, or maybe 4 1/2, but in the end it all comes down to one main problem. The four and a half parts are 1) prices for medical goods and services are higher in the U.S. than in other countries. 1.5) is the way we pay for pharmaceuticals specifically. 2) We pay for a lot of basically useless interventions -- money spent on procedures and drugs and devices that don't actually do any good. 3) We pay for extremely costly procedures that might do a little bit of good but that in most countries are considered just not worth it. 4) We get sick more often and need medical interventions because we don't invest in public health.

The One Ring to Rule Them All in this big picture is that health care in the U.S. is a commodity that it mostly sold for profit,  to enrich investors -- and even ostensibly non-profit health care providers in the U.S. behave like for-profit corporations. While drug companies and some providers in other countries are also for-profit corporations, their relationship to the buyer or buyers is different, and they don't extract as much profit or pay such absurd salaries to their executives. 

I'll start with the next post, on number 1.5, pharmaceutical prices. If you want to do some homework in the meantime, you can read this report from the Congressional Research Service, which last I heard is not associated with the Communist International.