The real reason is non-scaling vs scaling, IP like tech and entertainment and internet are incredibly cheap to scale. Manufacturing has also become a lot cheaper and automated.

In contrast, things that are supply constrained (housing) or mostly depend on human labour have become expensive. A nurse spends approximately the same time per patient as 100 years ago, a car requires a fraction of the human labour compared to 100 years ago.

There is a deficit of qualified nurses not only because it takes time and money to train one but also because you are not legally allowed to hire one even if you find it, without the necessary papers and certifications. More regulations!

So even if I agree with you - the human labor cost has increased and things dependent on it have become more expensive, the supply is artificially constrained by regulations as well.

Imagine if it was illegal to hire programmers without a certification from a government approved body. Would we still enjoy this explosion of incredibly cheap software in everything?

A more compact society would simply be less costly to maintain, and you can use public transit to scale transportation.

Housing is only very expensive because of land use policies and we don't build enough of them. Once we have a more liberal land use policies, then maybe labor costs will start to matter.

But Western European countries (which you probably compare to) had an immense, unspoken advantage: an incredible supply of highly educated, unexpensive health care work force - the Eastern Europe.

If you want to truly compare the healthcare of USA with Europe's please include countries like Bulgaria, Ukraine, Serbia, Romania, Moldova and so on. Yes, it's cheap. But you truly get what you pay for.

My point was very simple. Out of all of the world's developed countries, the USA is the one with the most expensive healthcare, despite less regulations. My point was that regulation by the government does not lead to "incredibly more expensive healthcare", as you have have stated.

From there, comparing the USA to Bulgaria is simply beside the point, the conversation was about regulation leading to "incredibly" higher costs.

Not even sure what exactly you think the proportion of foreign-born medical staff is in Europe. As far as I can find, the maximum is ~30% in the UK, while in Germany is 7%. But either way, to think that this is somehow the reason why Americans pay way more than anyone else for basic stuff like insulin and medical bills is ridiculous in my eyes.

Even if what you say is true for Western Europe, there are other countries (pretty much all) with highly-regulated healthcare and they all pay less than the US. But I'm sure there's some niche reason for why that would never work in the US.

The other ones are even worse, Moldova's GDP per capita is 1/20th the US one. So probably 30 times more money spent by the US on healthcare.

It's like comparing a maglev train to the original steam locomotive :-)

And health care cost increase exponentially with quality, not linearly. Bleeding edge research and medical advances appear in the USA mostly. And mostly everybody enjoys the fruits.

The US has a very parasitic healthcare system so I wonder how much their expenses are for actual research.

The first one is Swedish and the second is British.

The US is much better at creating visibility for its accomplishments.

Yet in 99% of your peers, OECD countries, those regulated domains are generally more regulated, not less. And we're talking about 40 countries or so, many as diverse as the US, big enough to be comparable.

How do these data point for into your narrative?

Healthcare is 2-3-4 times <<more expensive in the US>>.

Education is generally <<free or very cheap outside the US>>.

Housing is expensive outside the US, too, a bit less so.

I feel the problem is not regulation in the US, it's that you half ass it. Americans are all about "rugged individualism" and "small government" when advanced societies are advanced because large groups of people work well together, which is the opposite of individualism. I've been in places where there is an extreme emphasis on individualism and they generally they don't look good (for example Eastern Europe does it due to a huge negative legacy of forced collectivism).

[0]: https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/rankings_by_count...

[1]: https://www.supermoney.com/inflation-adjusted-home-prices/

And the quality of state-provided healthcare is significantly worse than in US. Most people with means get private medical insurance skipping the one purchased by their taxes entirely.

Eastern Europe has two huge problem completely overshadowing their advantage from less regulation: a strong culture of corruption instilled by the years of communism and a gigantic brain drain to a west more than happy to lower their own costs (in health care as well) with the best of the cheap, highly educated Eastern workforce.

And countries with comparable stats like waiting times pay less overall.

Don't die on this hill, it's not worth it.

It's the hill I live on, so I will probably die here.

And I also do not enjoy the hard left turn of the recent Western politics. Although I am sure they will realize their mistake eventually and turn back to the principles that brought their prosperity - I am afraid it will be a bumpy ride.