We (the US) are responsible for well over half of all pharmaceutical innovations. Because of the Orphan Drug Law (that all of our supposed allies ignore) European countries and others can demand at-cost prices from our manufacturers while dumping their own pharmaceutical products on us (European countries have an 80% market share in the manufacture of insulin; in France they sell to themselves at roughly 1/5th the price they sell to the US
https://www.france24.com/en/20190402-focus-united-states-price-insulin-killing-americans-diabetics-us-health-medicine-pharma). On another front, the US pays nearly a trillion dollars to police the central asian oil routes which primarily benefits Europe-which taxes oil at about 100% (this is why gas in France and others is like the equivalent of $8 a gallon).
Europe has no military-and our presence in places like Germany actually subsidizes the local economy with US taxpayer dollars (
https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1304557/Angela-Merkel-news-Germany-economy-US-Army-base-withdrawn-Donald-Trump-warning)
They get free access to oil that provides billions to the EU coffers (for the record the benefit to them-which I think is modest and something like 400 million barrels reserved for Europe unless I'm mistaken-is far outweighed by our cost in defending it)
They get at-cost drugs our companies had to pay billions to produce that must eventually be recouped through disproportionately burdening American consumers
The EU collectively has a trade imbalance with the US worth almost 200 billion as well.
Finally there's things like the totally unnecessary cost of both college and licensure (
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-doctor-monopoly-is-killing-american-patients/) which not only prevents perfectly qualified doctors from practicing but leaves new graduates with debts in the hundreds of thousands of dollars that needs to be paid off through exorbitant wages for doctors unheard of elsewhere across the world-including Europe. The high cost of healthcare in the US is a relatively recent phenomenon and like many of the worst market conditions the US has been left with the solutions are all obvious, elegantly simple and inexpensive to enforce but
(((for some reason))) that hasn't happened yet even with the pricing bubble being observed for decades.
If it were truly supply and demand then US consumers could purchase direct from Europe and others-forcing upward pricing pressure on EU healthcare systems and downward pressure on individual American consumers; in the EU this drugs are sold at prices they wouldn't break even on because they can recoup the losses by gouging Amerifats. Instead the FDA simply doesn't allow this to happen under the guise of keeping Americans "safe" from pre-approved drugs freely available in trusted countries. Apart from that, the bloated legal standards for practicing physicians should be relaxed and the cost of college could-with the stroke of a pen reversing previous legislation-be greatly reduced, and with these measures our healthcare apparatus could become much more manageable. Thankfully BLUMPF has been making headway with legislation that should have been passed 20 years ago or more but it doesn't do much for people who've already been ruined by this absolute clown show system that's been allowed to freely metastisize over the decades.