Aaron Carroll once again compares US out-of-pocket healthcare costs to other wealthy countries. Kevin Drum opines:
Different countries have different cultures and different ways of allocating costs, so a simple chart like this will never be definitive. Still, the only real evidence that high copays produce lower healthcare expenditures is that one Rand study, and it's getting kind of long in the tooth. (It was also a short-term study, had fairly low maximums, and investigated the healthcare world of the 70s, which is quite different from today's.) Done properly, making people pay more for healthcare might be a good idea, but the international evidence doesn't do much to support the notion that it would have a huge impact.
The Dish 