This will partially ignore your attribution that the US problem is a complex multi-faceted issue (I agree with that but wanted to focus in) - you mention that higher education is too expensive and suggest that there are many other societal factors that make the US noncompetitive. This can cause an effect like we're seeing with the US healthcare market but the US does well in a lot of the more transferable industries (like software development) and I'm not seeing how the factors you're highlighting for healthcare wouldn't equally apply to all of those transferable jobs.