It's a deep topic but I can cherry pick three big reasons for you in no particular order. -Most hospitals and larger primary care installations are monopolies.

It's a deep topic but I can cherry pick three big reasons for you in no particular order. -Most hospitals and larger primary care installations are monopolies. There is not and cannot be for practical, zoning and regulatory reasons any sort of meaningful "competition". As a result most regulation and enforcement is toothless because no one wants the resulting problems of closing, even temporarily, a facility that is the only care for tens of thousands of people. When there are no consequences for bad behaviors things tends toward a lowest common denominator. There are many examples but MLK Harbor Hospital strikes me as a particularly horrific one. It operated as one of the worst facilities in the US, by many objective and subjective measures, for 35+ years before it was finally closed. -Healthcare, at it's base, is a resource allocation problem. When I last calculated what it would cost to provide every american with all of the healthcare they might reasonably consume which was 2019, that number was ~92 trillion dollars a year. We actually spend ~4 trillion. How do we decide who doesn't get the thing they should get at the time they should get it? We employ a pseudo-random system and as a result it is incredibly inefficient. Without getting into the deep dive that is healthcare costs I will just point out that the US has by far the largest number of acute care, ICU and trauma center services per capita anywhere in the world. For example we have seven times the number per capita that a country we are commonly compare to does, England. This is astronomically expensive. Without ultimately capping in some way the total resource expenditure per person this will continue. Is it a worthwhile use of resources to expend hundreds of thousands of dollars to extend someones life for 2 weeks? Maybe it depends on the someone, an 85 year old? An 8 year old? It's a very difficult set of questions that mostly just gets avoided. -Patients do not have a rational sense of value when it comes to healthcare services. The US has very low taxes compared to much of the world and when you take that into account it has relatively low healthcare insurance premiums. I'm not saying they are low to people on an individual basis but it's a complex thing. Take canada. Every canadian individual including children is paying, at a minimum, ~$600 a month for healthcare in taxes. They don't think of it that way because it is lumped in to the tax bill. Many people in the US pay much less than this. I have a friend who was recently complaining to me about a $700 ambulance bill. They were doing this as they were holding a brand new $1,000 iphone in their hand. I sat down with them and in a "napkin" spreadsheet created a fictitious ambulance service. They walked away thinking $600 was a pretty good deal. The inefficiency is patients put off a lot of things that are small due to cost. Those things dramatically exacerbate inefficiencies. See points 1 & 2.