Comment by jeffreyrogers

> The US spends ~$14,570 per person on healthcare. Japan spends ~$5,790 and has the highest life expectancy in the OECD.

Ethnic Japanese in the US live have about the same life expectancy as Japanese living in Japan do (within 1 year). US GDP per capita is about 2.4x Japan's. So the numbers don't look nearly as bad when you adjust for that. The higher drug prices in the US are definitely part of it, part of it is our population is less healthy in general (fatter, worse diet, more drug and alcohol abuse), but part of it is Baumol's cost disease[0]. Biggest barrier to lowering healthcare costs in the US is it probably requires paying doctors, nurses, etc. significantly less and most of them work hard and feel like they deserve to be paid as well as they do.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect

Edit: to some extent high US drug prices are a public good that subsidizes healthcare for the rest of the world. I don't know the data but I would guess the US is responsible for a disproportionate share of new drugs.