It's part of labor cost in many other countries too, since it's a percentage of the wages, so if health care is very expensive wages have to be high. (As a firs

It's part of labor cost in many other countries too, since it's a percentage of the wages, so if health care is very expensive wages have to be high. (As a first order guess.) But simply the problem is that the US economy is brutally productive, so the price of every input (labor, raw materials, capital) is priced according to their opportunity costs. If the same labor could make something that would then lead to a lot of profit in some other sector, then construction has to pay that high labor cost too. http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/show/rs-236-alex-tabarrok-on-why-are-the-prices-so-dmn-high.html http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/show/rs-236-alex-tabarr...