I'm pretty sure it's not enough doctors, patent laws, and FDA regs being very costly to meet.
Our number of doctors per 1000 people is roughly the same as the UK and the EU average, and more than Canada and Japan. Scandinavia, Australia, and New Zealand have significantly more but I'm certain that if you developed an equation of number of doctors per 1000 with the cost of health care we'd still significantly outpace those counties. There are pockets of the country that are healthy with an abundance of doctors like Southern California and Colorado but health care isn't cheaper in these places when compared to say South Dakota.
Those other three things don't really speak to things like the absurd cost of insulin, and before we go there let's not act as if the insulin example is isolated.
Those things are certainly factors but they are far from anything close to the greatest factor. Whomever said that the driving force is accountability to share holders had it correctly.
I'm not sure where sys got his numbers on insurers and hospitals not profiting from increased healthcare costs but they are either misleading, inaccurate, or both.
https://www.axios.com/health-care-industry-on-track-massive-q2-profits-1533226387-dacec8f8-c9f5-406c-a49e-1103e3316c64.htmlDownload the chart they link. UnitedHealth Group (unfortunately my insurer, pretty much everyone) had over $12 billion in profits last year. HCA Healthcare, one of if not the largest hospital conglomos in the country only had a reported $4 billion in profits last year.
The healthcare industry have annual profits larger than the GDP's of most of those counties that have better doctor to patient ratios than the United States.
The talk of universal Medicare is frustrating because it's not going to happen, the healthcare industry is just way too big of a sector of our economy. I wish the democrats would come up with a plan to heavily regulate the industry with price controls but provide incentives for innovation for pharmaceutical companies and tie incentives to desired incomes for providers. I'd also be perfectly fine with protecting providers from malpractice claims if doing so can directly have a positive effect on the number of providers and the lowering of costs.