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.