>I don’t know how “spending more money for less benefits” is better than “callously refusing to spend any money”?

I don't know if it is better, but it is certainly a different problem, which matters if anyone is interested in understanding or fixing it.

I think it is important to understand the problem specifically there are a lot of patients dying of treatable cancer who would benefit from a health care system that functions better.

Sure it is necessary to understand the problem to fix it, I am not denying that. Sure, “refusing to pay” vs “paying a lot and accomplishing fuck all” are different problems. But the context of this discussion is “can US healthcare system be objectively called third-world-like” which it can. Whether it is bad because of X or Y reasons is not relevant and comments like the one I responded to, come off as trying to diminish how dire the situation really is.

Didn't seem like they were trying to diminish anything. The specifically called out how terrible the administration of the health programs are.

There are significant differences when it comes to expectations on a fix. If the problem is just refusal to spend, the policy problem is easily improved with easy to write legislation: 'medicare will now cover everyone over 55'. The US healthcare system is far more difficult to improve than that, as just asking the government to cover more bills at the prices companies and the public pay would be hard to sustain. Changes to make costs more in line with European countries would have extreme opposition from some people: Every dollar of waste is someone else's income, and in general those are also American voters. This doesn't make American healthcare any better, but it means that it takes extreme efforts to make it better, even a little bit. So it's at least not a matter of malice.

As for labor laws, the US does far better than it seems. Easy to fire also means easy to hire too, as the risk taken by the employer is also far lower. And the stronger the protections, the higher the slack, showing in unemployment. Very few European countries have the unemployment rates of the US, and the ones that do get there via a lot of temporary work, which has about as many protections as US work. And even with those protections, you still see Spain and Greece at well over 10% unemployment, while the US is under 4.

I think there are some "simple" fixes that would go a long way to improving the healthcare system.

The easiest is basing Medicare spending on patient benefit in terms off quality adjusted life years.

I think it is a common misunderstanding that European countries maintain lower costs via price caps. In actuality, most don't limit the sale price, but control how much they are willing to pay for a drug, device, or procedure. This means that a product has to be substantially better to command a substantially higher price. More treatment with slightly worse products means much more benefit overall. Similarly, it puts some downward pressure on the price of new products because they have to compete with cheaper but less effective ones.

Using spain and greece for comparison sure seems like cherrypicking your data.

Also it has been proven many times by many people that if US were to transition to single payer insurance system, it would actually decrease the spending. No one claims it is easy, but there is absolutely no reason for the US insurance system to exist under single payer, that would be just setting piles of cash on fire.

I would quibble with the word proven here. There are compelling arguments with good data. single-payer could be better or worse depending on actual implementation and coverage.

It's also worth noting that many countries with single pair still have a supplemental insurance market for premium coverage not included.