The US spends 18% of GDP on healthcare (2x most other rich countries) for very inferior health outcomes vs the rest of the OECD: shorter avg lifespans, higher maternal and infant mortality, higher addiction rates, etc. The charts are in the lower half of this article: https://medium.com/p/25cffe5441b7/edit .
Medical bankruptcy is virtually unknown except in America. Watch Brits react to US healthcare costs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kll-yYQwmuM
Even right wing Tories hold the NHS to be sacred and BoJo won't dare touch it.
I'm fortunate to have had zero experience as a patient in the US healthcare system since 2001. That time cost $300 for a doctor visit in NY. At that time the same visit in Latvia would have cost $20. A doctor visit in a fancy private clinic in Paris cost me $60.
Innovation: Read Bad Pharma by Ben Goldacre (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/oct/17/bad-pharma-ben-goldacre-review) and former FDA regulator Martha Angell's 2005 article in the NY Review of Books, The Truth About the Drug Companies (https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2004/07/15/the-truth-about-the-drug-companies/), for how the American pharma innovation story is a myth. Most innovation is publicly funded by the NIH, just as DARPA created the internet. Big Pharma is basically in the venture capital and drug regulatory approval and distribution business of low risk me-too drugs and biosimilars, not the innovation business. They buy innovation when the biotech and genomic startup founders want to exit or need their regulatory process and distribution capacity. But even the clinical trials are outsourced to CROs (Clinical Research Organizations).
I'm an angel investor in one telemedicine startup and own a bunch of pharma, biotech and genomic stocks (Roche (Swiss), GSK (British), MRK, BNTX (German), MRNA, BMY, ABBV, AMGN, NVO (Danish), NVS (Swiss), VRTX, ABCL (Canadian) BNGO). I put my money on the line when I bet on these stocks continuing to feed at the public trough to benefit their shareholders more than the patients. This is not about socialism vs capitalism in healthcare. It's about who gets which. In the US it's capitalism for the patients and socialism for Big Pharma and Big Insurance--medical market failure through regulatory capture and information asymmetry as Kenneth Arrow predicted in 1963.
No sane German, Frenchman, Brit or Estonian would trade his healthcare system for the American one.
Latvian diversity: my wife is half Russian, half Polish and born in Latvia. Her first husband was part Latvian, part Belorussian, part Russian. At Riga Business School I had students who were:
1/2 Latvian, 1/2 Nigerian-British
part Latvian, Russian, Ukrainian, Jewish, Tatar.
part Belorussian, Latvian, Ukrainian
Tadzhik, Kazakh, Uzbek, Moldovan, Polish
1/2 Latvian, 1/2 German
1/2 British, 1/2 Latvian
A guest speaker in my investments course was a portfolio mgr from Azerbaijan married to a Latvian accountant.
So, the homogenous vs diverse country argument doesn't apply here.
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Obama's unearned Peace Prize is not relevant to a discussion about healthcare policy and economics.
States rights: you may recall Trump's infringement on California's states rights in environmental regulation. The American right is very selective in its endorsement of states rights.
