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Part, but definitely not the main reason. If the doctors worked for free, US would still be more expensive than Germany or Japan.


Agreed. There are around 80,000 medical students in any given year in the US. Assume that all of them pay $50,000 per year in tuition. That's maybe $4b per year. The costs of health insurance, diagnostic testing, pharmaceuticals, etc more than eclipse that number.


And the bigger problem is that there is profiteering at every step of the way... Medical Insurance, devices, private testing labs, hospitals, doctors, pharma...it all adds up. As someone else said, it's a free market without a real market for competition... I don't remember where I heard it, so citation needed, but the number that sticks on my head is that we spend 25% on administration alone. Lots of billing companies exist just to handle the complicated mess we have created... More profits in the system.




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