No one here has a clue why health care costs what it does in the US.
It is interesting that when it comes to the rate of increase of health care costs, we're not at the top. Not nearly. The other systems are racing to catch up with us.
I think our US health care costs so much for five reasons. Foremost is our lifestyle - we are wilder, meaner, and more free than any of those nations. We eat more than is healthy, especially meat, fat, salt and sugar. We drive more - and faster. We are more violent (and better armed.) We are more drug addicted. We are more black - just learning how to extend the average black lifespan to parity with whites would give us parity with those other countries, let alone the moral component. In short, we are the wild animal that most of our domesticated foreign brethren once were. And like any wild animal, our life is shorter than our leashed cousins. I for one prefer freedom to captivity, but there's no denying that once we too are broken to the leash, more fully managed by government, our life span will increase and our medical costs will go down.
The second major factor is sophistication - we have more sophisticated equipment, and much more of it per capita, than do other nations with socialized medicine. We don't like to wait, and we expect the best. There's a reason that in Canada you can get your dog an MRI more quickly than yourself.
The third major reason is our lack of competition. Most states like to keep a firm handle on availability, so that most areas only have a couple of major players. Thus the only required innovation and efficiency is that required to compete with your major competition. Smaller, more innovative competition can be controlled with political donations which spur regulations and laws.
Fourth is our decoupling of health care and paying for health care. Coupled with our entitlement mentality we have come to view health insurance not as something that protects us from unexpected major expenses, but rather as someone else paying our day to day health care costs. That leads us to demand the best but expect to pay the least.
And the fifth is our hybrid system - we have a horrendous amount of hoops to jump through in our system of patches, which leads to a high cost of compliance. Any system newly designed is always going to work better, at least for awhile, than a system patched and tweaked, often no reasons which have nothing to do with health care.
So profit isn't a large part of the costs of health care, but it's responsible for why it costs so much?