Im pretty sure pharma is one of them. The US consumes more meds than any other country per capita, its insane. It has an aderall and opium epidemic. Pharma can pay for 30-1m ads constantly on TV: the margins have to be ridicolous to market drugs that require prescriptions to patients.

"Ask your doctor to prescribe you this"? what the hell.

Drugs that get advertised are ones still on patent that have high profit margins. Opioids and amphetamines are cheap to manufacture, long off-patent, and available as generics. They're not the drugs that get advertised on TV.

The pharma business used to have spectacular margins, 20 years ago. The ROI of new chemical entities has been falling since the 1990s. Pharma companies have been shedding personnel and facilities and merging for a long time to keep stock prices up. They're having a hell of a time coming up with new patented products that are broadly useful and better than generics, so direct-to-consumer advertising is one of the few avenues left to boost revenue. It's funny how corporate arrogance and desperation can look so similar.

Sure it is, the US spends almost double per-capita on meds compared to western european countries. On the other hand meds is only 12% of US healthcare expenditures, so if we were to reset to e.g. Germany's per-capita medication costs, it would cut US costs by less than 6%.

This is a great example of what my comment is saying. There is no obvious silver bullet because everything in the US costs more than in other countries.

[edit]

Also, per-capita government expenditures on health care in the US are actually higher than in Germany[1]

1: https://data.oecd.org/healthres/health-spending.htm#indicato...