Among Noah Millman's answers:
A great deal of it is due to the fact that America’s health-care providers earn a lot more on average than those of other countries. But the big driver of this disparity is that America has vastly more specialists. And the big driver of that disparity is that everybody would like to see specialists more easily, and you can only do that if you have more specialists. And since America has fewer incentives for cost-containment, Americans get what they want (and pay for it), and people in other countries do more queuing. (And they do the most queuing in systems that employ health-care providers directly, which is exactly what you’d expect – when prices are driven down artificially by a monopsony buyer, supply dries up.)
The Dish 