That’s in large part because the costs of healthcare are crazy high, not the cost of insurance.

They are interrelated, yes. But fundamentally we are at a place where providers, especially hospitals, are billing insanely high rates for services compared to other countries.

It's nutty to me that yours is the first comment that I'm reading in this thread that has mentioned that. The provider part of this shit sandwich (to steal a phrase used elsewhere in this thread) is by far the more problematic piece.

When you use a service without paying for it (e.g., television, radio, Yoogle, Facepage, and so on), you are not the customer but the vector to get to the real customer who is paying. No, buying a TV or paying your ISP is not paying for the services you are accessing.

What Americans think of as “health” “insurance” fits this model. Providers are in the business of soaking their customers the various tax-favored third-party payers for all they can. Of course prices rise continually. People are stirred into a frenzy about rising costs and demand that politicians just do something! The insurers get more tax-favored money that providers happily mop up.

Medicare is also more expensive per capita than most modern nations and its publicly funded.