Does the rest of the world benefit from the US having a largely private healthcare system?
The US spends far more on healthcare than countries such as the UK, Switzerland and Japan without achieving obviously better health outcomes. However, it is also the world's largest pharmaceutical market and a major source of biomedical R&D.
Does this create a global benefit? For example, US patients and insurers pay much higher drug prices, potentially making pharmaceutical R&D more profitable, while countries with public systems negotiate lower prices but still benefit from the resulting drugs.
If the US introduced single-payer healthcare and negotiated prices down toward European/Japanese levels, basically are other countries currently "free-riding" on high US healthcare spending?
Essentially, is the inefficient and expensive US healthcare system partly subsidising medical innovation for the rest of the world?