I would list a few reasons that US health costs are so crazy: 1.) Insurance drives up the cost and hides true costs from consumers. [...] The problem with th

I would list a few reasons that US health costs are so crazy: 1.) Insurance drives up the cost and hides true costs from consumers. [...] The problem with this argument is that all the available evidence says exactly the opposite. Private U.S. health-insurance exposes more of the cost of health care to the patient than any other first-world health system, and yet it's more expensive than any other first-world health system (including America's own socialist insurance scheme, Medicare). Moreover, the trend over the last 30 years or so in private U.S. health insurance has been to increase the exposure of the patient to costs of care (i.e. we pay much more in deductibles and co-pays than Americans a generation ago did). The result has not been a decrease in health care inflation. Quite the contrary, actually.