Abundance

by Ezra Klein

Across Europe, government-administered health-care systems negotiate down the prices of drugs and treatments. In America, our fear of socialized medicine has led to a hodgepodge of private and public insurers who do not coordinate and do not effectively negotiate. The weight-loss drug Ozempic, for instance, costs about ten times as much in America as it does in Britain or France.9 Those countries have national health-care systems that restrict what pharmaceutical companies can charge, and we do not. As a result, taxpayers in Europe spend less on health care, as a percentage of GDP, than taxpayers in America. And then Americans have enormous private bills atop our public spending. Keeping the American health-care state weak has made the American government larger and left Americans poorer.