The reason for this gap is that these are unnecessary conveniences. There's a reason the US care actually never rank very well on WHO rankings, despite the availability of extremely advanced care.

You can get most stuff done immediately in the UK too, by paying for private insurance (incidentally you'd still pay less in taxes + private insurance than Americans pay in taxes towards healthcare alone) or just going to a private clinic. Most people don't, though, because as much as people might complain about waiting, they also tend to accept that the NHS prioritises by clinical need and will provide treatment when necessary. Including through buying capacity from private providers or sending patients abroad if serious enough.

The result is that when you need it, you generally get treatment rapidly, regardless of your financials. When you don't need it instantly, then yes, you get to wait (or pay).

If anything, this situation in the US reflects how distorted the market is by having a system where healthcare providers are have an incentive to find every means of charging sky high rates as most of them are not paid directly by patients, and insurers have little reason to push back (because the occasional experience of high medical expenses provides a massive reason for people to well covered by insurance, and they're competing with other insurers that will use unwillingness to cover certain types of expenses against them).

But ultimately this is also part of why so many Americans have been poorly covered by insurance: The system has been geared towards people who can pay higher premiums. Had the US system focused on affordability, and left luxuries to top-up insurance like in the UK, the US could have paid for universal care out of current taxes and still have (lots) money left over.

> That money is going somewhere.

A lot of it is going on over diagnosing and over treating, both of which cause harm.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unnecessary_health_care

So you're agreeing at least in part with my original assertion, then. Namely, that we probably need to be less willing to pay high prices for drugs (and by extension other treatments) because in many cases they are of much less value than other things we could buy instead. Right? I mean, overtreatment has negative value, so it's hard not to imagine that what was paid for it couldn't have been better spent on something else. Anything else. Throwing the money into a fire would have provided more value.

No. Over testing and over treatment is unrelated to the (initial) high price of drugs and other treatments.

Just this week I got a 2-month wait from a US hospital for a scan I got a 1-month delay outside the US. And that's a major, top ten US hospital, not some dinky place no one has heard of (but it's a non-standard scan setting, I'll grant you that). And the out-of-pocket (despite having insurance) is almost as high as the entire scan if I did it privately in the other place (which I pay zero for - it's all covered)

> That money is going somewhere.

Mostly to the pockets of the health insurance companies, which rake in ridiculous profits for providing services which are essentially non-existent and not needed almost anywhere else in the world.