In my experience, a "standard citizen" can easily afford healthcare. I'm bombarded with "experts say" and "studies show" (they mean nothing anymore) all the time but when rubber meets road, your average person in the US has affordable options. I think your question makes more sense if you ask specifically about poor people.

@acpilot untrue, my family is essentially uninsurable outside of employer-sponsored plans, and my wife and I make well above the median income. While I don't disagree that the problem is frequently exaggerated as a rhetorical ploy I'm inclined to say that intuition is probably flawed, and the statistics are probably correct.

But they are so consistently flawed.

@acpilot If you take, for example, Australia - which has similar per capita income - you would find that the per capita cost of health care is far less than the US. This is similar across other developed nations (see e.g. Health expenditure and financing, per capita, 1970 to 2015) and thus the OP is asking the very valid question of "why?".

@acpilot I'm not sure if you live in the US, but if you do, I expect you have a full-time job with an employer with a health care plan that you participate in. You also might be single. Unless you have a quality plan through your employer, health insurance will cost a significant portion of your income in the US. And that's just the insurance, which does not pay for all of your health expenses. I was insured when I broke my foot and also when I was taken by ambulance to the emergency room. Both events cost me more than a month's rent after insurance. And I'm firmly middle-class.

See this fantastic answer on Politics.SE to answer your question. TL;DR the healthcare market is not free by any measure.

"essential goods like housing and food are by no means comparable with healthcare costs" Housing costs are no joke either.

@acpilot: I don't think that is a fair assessment. The question isn't "Why is it unaffordable?" nor is it "Do many people have issues with medical costs?". People who get seriously ill for the long term consistently run into either exorbitant medical costs or will have been paying a premium on their insurance up until then (well above what the average person can reasonably afford). And even then, the question isn't whether it is affordable or not, but why it is so high relative to other countries. Even if affordable, that does not make it as cheap.

Surely the reason is simple: In the US almost all healthcare is provided by for-profit organizations at every level. In any economic activity, the more middle-men taking a profit, the higher the cost to the final consumer.

@acpilot "Affordable" is irrelevant to the question (aside from the dispute about your assertion). The question is "why does healthcare in the US cost more than elsewhere" not "is healthcare affordable."

But affordability is key. That's the whole concern.

@acpilot If affordability is key then I'll just say this: comparatively its not affordable. And multiple people already gave you examples as to why its unaffordable eg. middle-class paying more then a months salary as Todd said, you'd call that affordable? Where I live I pay around 150 euros a month and most is included (you can choose to not include dental for example), if I make very high costs I'd only have to pay a specified number I agreed to (called "own risk" if you translate it), that number isn't very high and can even be 0 but that would mean your monthly payments go up.

Your title asks why heathcare is so expensive in the US but the content of your question and the data you reference is about spending. In order to understand whether healthcare is 'expensive', you need to understand how much healthcare US citizens get and/or what outcomes they get relative to other nations. I'm not sure there's a way to do that that is satisfying to all interested parties.

@JimmyJames I think it's fair to equate the level of healthcare between the US and e.g. Western Europe in terms of reasons to visit and what is provided. The main difference is the cost, not the medical procedure. You are correct if we are comparing nations with a huge difference in healthcare quality, but OP specifically mentions comparably affluent nations. For those, we can reasonably equate healthcare standards.

@acpilot apart from you talking about "affordable" healthcare (which, as has already been pointed out, has nothing at all to do with the question as asked), I notice that you used words such as "standard citizen" and "easily afford". Could you clarify, for the benefit of the discussion, who is a "standard citizen" and what "easily afford" means for you? Also, I have to ask: why would it matter if a "standard citizen" could "easily afford" it? Healthcare is a basic requirement for living in a modern society, so what about those "non-standard-citizens"? Good riddance?

@Flater That's probably fair although one of the papers in the accepted answers mentions that the US refuses to ration healthcare and I've seen many claims that in Europe and Canada, newer or more expensive treatments are not always available (I make no claims either way.) But there are other factors as well. For example, does the US lifestyle contribute to more utilization compared to these countries? My neighbor might spend more on gasoline per year than I do but that doesn't mean they pay a higher price for gasoline. They are just buying more of it.

@Flater And another confounding factor is that hospitals are not allowed to turn people away if they cannot pay so they are forced to subsidize those costs by overcharging other customers. Insurers (despite claims in this answers) have the power to negotiate these rates but individuals do not. So trying to determine e.g. what an MRI scan costs in the US is no simple task. You end up having to look at the entire spend and divide by the population with is also flawed. E.g, how do to account for homeless people using the ER as a shelter? Is that counted in the EU as a healthcare expense?

@JimmyJames Your points are somewhat inverted. Offsetting costs for non-payers by charging others more doesn't change the total cost for all patients, if the offset is done solely for the purpose of covering the costs of non-payers. Prohibitively high costs for simple medical procedures or insurance cause people to avoid medical procedures, which can skew the figures either way (less patients, but then also more severe cases due to avoided early treatment). But mainly, "many things could be different" does not preclude OP's investigation into why things such as cost are different.

@JimmyJames [..] Your response to OP is akin to asking a roadside mechanic why your car won't start and having them tell you "well I can't check or fix every single part of your car when roadside!". It is not a reason to not investigate the issue at hand, even if there is a chance you might not be able to fully address it.

@Flater I don't follow your logic. My point is that the question' why is healthcare so expensive' is different from 'why are healthcare costs high'. There's an implicit assumption that the cost is a function of higher prices but that far from certain unless something has changed since I studied healthcare economics in grad school less than 10 years ago.

@Flater Your tone is unnecessarily antagonistic. I'm simply pointing out that there are two different questions here that are implied to be the same.

@JimmyJames "expensive" and "having a high cost" are plainly synonymous, especially in common parlance.

@Flater No, they are not, not in this context. Just like 'cheap' can mean both 'inexpensive' and 'bad quality', cost means the total paid for something. 'Expensive' is a relative term related to a per unit cost of equivalent products. It's possible, for example, to have high costs by buying many inexpensive things and have a low costs by buy few expensive items.

@Flater Look here. We can see that the % of annual income spent on gasoline in the US is higher than every European country in the list. Can we conclude that gasoline is more expensive (consumer price) in the US than in Europe?