National rankings for medical care are notoriously biased, and usually constructed for supporting a political agenda. For example:
The United States trails far behind other high-income countries on measures of health care affordability, administrative efficiency, equity, and outcomes.
www.commonwealthfund.org
The US is dead last. Of course, if you do even the most superficial analysis of the data you find that the comparisons are purposely misleading. For example, Norway has a population of about 5 million, Sweden about 11 million, Netherlands about 18 million, Switzerland about 9 million. By US standards these are small markets. The healthcare system solutions are less complex for small rich countries than for the US. Two of the countries on this list, Canada and the UK, are said to have notorious waiting lists for diagnostics and procedures, and Canada even has a government web page for estimating the wait times for something as simple as an MRI.
www.ontariohealth.ca
I picked the Ontario example because that's the best-case province for infrastructure. Wait times in the US for diagnostic imaging are usually negligible, but the waiting lists are not factors in many of the rankings available. Interesting.
It is true that the US has the highest medical costs per capita of any developed country, but your estimate of 20% of US GNP is high. In 2021, it was apparently 18.3%, and that was with the pandemic skewing the results. (The skew includes a large increase in Medicaid coverage to a greater proportion of the population due to COVID legislation.) In 2019 healthcare was 17.7% of the economy, still high, but significantly lower than your claim.
As for AI improving healthcare, most of the value-add realized so far falls into two areas, medical image analysis and drug research, and most of that value is in software, not semiconductors.
Plentiful financing and multiple pharma partnerships illustrate the burgeoning interest in applying artificial intelligence tools to drug research and development.
www.nature.com
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has recently started to gear-up its application in various sectors of the society with the pharmaceutical industry as a front-runner beneficiary. This review highlights the impactful use of AI in diverse areas of the pharmaceutical ...
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
AI-based healthcare as you're imagining it seems akin to self-driving vehicles. Yes, some tools will make healthcare professionals more efficient, like ADAS makes human drivers better, but after all of the hype investment in self-driving vehicles is decreasing. I think AI-based medical care reminds me, for the time being, of self-driving vehicles on public roads, and would make me wary of investing.
The complexity and rise of data in healthcare means that artificial intelligence (AI) will increasingly be applied within the field. Several types of AI are already being employed by payers and providers of care, and life sciences companies. The key categories ...
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Labelling the entire US healthcare system as a criminal organization is ridiculous. For example, the Wall Street Journal has been taking aim lately at non-profit hospital systems in the US, like this one. They're following the letter of the law in some cases, however dubious their actions are:
Through a government program aimed at helping low-income patients, some hospitals buy medications at reduced prices. They can sell them to patients and their insurers for much more.
www.wsj.com
The same with private equity money investing in healthcare, often by buying private medical practices and clinics. Disgusting, but legal:
Hey, it’s Anna in Virginia. Private equity piled records amount of money into health-care companies last year. As you might suspect, that’s not great news for patients. But first...
www.bloomberg.com
I could on and on with examples, but I'm too lazy. IMO, the evidence says you're aiming at the wrong targets. I'm not a supporter of the current state of the US healthcare system, I think it needs far more regulation in pricing, administration, transparency, and efficiency than is in the laws. Nonsense like medical insurance networks, completely non-transparent pricing, every insurance company using different claim applications, the ability of insurance companies to deny claims for treatment prescribed by licensed physicians, legal drug pricing dictated solely by what the market will bear for target revenues and profits and supported by patent laws, and a convoluted drug market with middlemen distributors and secret agreements. I think some of our congresspeople see these problems as intractable and want to throw it all away in favor of a nationalized, single-payer approach, but I think there's evidence that some key issues could be addressed with targeted legislation that could be implemented without the risky strategy of blowing the entire healthcare system up and rebuilding it. In the past ten years or so, for example, the proliferation of using physician assistants and nurse practitioners to provide treatment when applicable for less complex issues in place of medical doctors has been a big win for treatment availability. For minor surgery, nurse anesthetists act in place of MD anesthesiologists. On the other hand, in my experience, many care facilities are charging almost as much for these lesser-trained people than those with MD degrees. Are these providers criminals? No. Would I trade the US healthcare system for one higher up in the suspicious rankings? I'm not sure.
Regarding Cost Plus Drugs, I'm a customer for the one drug I take (a generic statin), and the limitation of CPD is that they only deal with generics, which are not so much of an affordability issue. Yes, the savings are there, I save about 75% by using CPD, but it's 75% of about $8/month compared to, say, a Walmart pharmacy. The real affordability problems are in patent-pending (brand name) drugs for which there are no generic alternatives. I know you like CNBC:
Mark Cuban's Cost Plus Drugs is delivering steep discounts on hundreds of prescription drugs, but it may not have the brand-name drugs you need yet. Here's why.
www.cnbc.com