I was going to say something about how the US market is a lot bigger than the Swiss market, but I've had to reconsider. Switzerland is a country of 6 million pe

I was going to say something about how the US market is a lot bigger than the Swiss market, but I've had to reconsider. Switzerland is a country of 6 million people and is about the size of an "average" US state. Most US states are a little smaller in population (If Switzerland was a US state, it'd be the 13th largest), and a LOT larger in area. So for a "normal" state, Switzerland actually has a bigger healthcare market. California, about 5 times the size of the Swiss healthcare market, still manages to screw things up royally though. People are often blaming the US legal rules. In Switzerland, if you want to win a court case that a MD acted improperly (justifying damages), you have to get a jury of his peers (ie. MDs) to agree on that (which is not impossible, but ...). In the US, you have to get a jury of patients to agree on that. Needless to say, there are many, many more medical cases in the US, with spectacular damage payments (damage payments are also standardized in the EU. If an MD kills you through negligence or outright a mistake (not satisfying the level of a criminal act), his employer (even though they're mostly freelancers, this is an exception in the law) owes your family 300k euro (inflation adjusted since 19xx, so it's a bit more). In the US, it's not fixed, judges decide, but it seems that number runs into the tens of millions of dollars.