Comment by Aloisius

The primary reason Japan's healthcare is affordable is because the government institutes strict price controls on healthcare providers. Every procedure, every service, every medical device and every drug has a price fixed nationally and those prices are below even what Medicaid pays.

Normally, price controls would lead to shortages, but with healthcare, there's always shortages with or without price controls and every country has to, in some way or another, ration care anyway.

If you tried to implement that here, doctors would riot (read: use their ridiculously powerful lobby to kill it or get the fee schedule increased - which they did every year for a decade when medicare dared to institute cost controls. see: medicare doc fix).