Blame the complete and total lack of any competition as well. To this day hospitals often outright refuse to quote the pricing of treatments and drugs, drugs ca

Blame the complete and total lack of any competition as well. To this day hospitals often outright refuse to quote the pricing of treatments and drugs, drugs can't be re-imported from cheaper locales (such as India or even Canada), and if one happens to be uninsured, hospital prices are truly eye watering even though you're paying cash, and hospital would not get anywhere near as much if you went through insurance. One would hope the _realistic_ solutions to all of this are blindingly obvious, and yet... Big Pharma is so deeply entrenched that Trump couldn't even make any headway with "favored nations" domestic pricing that he proposed. It makes sense: I, a freelancer, for instance, can't charge my larger clients more because of such a clause. And whatever drugs he did make cheaper (insulin, epi pens), Biden restored the pricing on almost immediately after taking office. Read the fact checks, they bury this particular lede really, really well, so you'll have to read very carefully, much like I used to read Pravda when I was a kid in the USSR.