Salaries are higher in the US, especially for highly skilled medical practitioners. Any sort of medical investigation or treatment is going to cost more in the US than in Japan.
Many costs are explicitly regulated down in Japan. Amusingly, this specifically includes ChristianKl’s example of MRIs: they are not allowed to cost more than a certain (rather low) amount.
Of course this may increase costs elsewhere; or it may, by lowering medical salaries or something, drive medical personnel out of Japan to places where they can earn more or have more comfortable working conditions. But such actual evidence as I’ve seen suggests that, Econ 101 notwithstanding, Japanese healthcare is way cheaper than American overall and of comparable quality.
Most healthcare in the US is paid for via for-profit insurance companies. Most healthcare in Japan is paid for via government-run insurance that is not required to be profitable. That removes one layer of extra profit-taking.
There may be differences in, say, administrative structure that greatly affect the amount of overhead cost; these might be there just for path-dependent historical reasons, or because of different levels of lawsuit-fear, or because of different government regulations, or for many other reasons.
I am not going to make any confident claims about what the actual sources of the difference are; I don’t have enough information to know. But nothing I’ve seen makes it at all plausible that Japanese healthcare is cheaper than American because there’s more regulation in the US and less in Japan.
Possible other sources include:
Salaries are higher in the US, especially for highly skilled medical practitioners. Any sort of medical investigation or treatment is going to cost more in the US than in Japan.
Many costs are explicitly regulated down in Japan. Amusingly, this specifically includes ChristianKl’s example of MRIs: they are not allowed to cost more than a certain (rather low) amount.
Of course this may increase costs elsewhere; or it may, by lowering medical salaries or something, drive medical personnel out of Japan to places where they can earn more or have more comfortable working conditions. But such actual evidence as I’ve seen suggests that, Econ 101 notwithstanding, Japanese healthcare is way cheaper than American overall and of comparable quality.
Most healthcare in the US is paid for via for-profit insurance companies. Most healthcare in Japan is paid for via government-run insurance that is not required to be profitable. That removes one layer of extra profit-taking.
There may be differences in, say, administrative structure that greatly affect the amount of overhead cost; these might be there just for path-dependent historical reasons, or because of different levels of lawsuit-fear, or because of different government regulations, or for many other reasons.
I am not going to make any confident claims about what the actual sources of the difference are; I don’t have enough information to know. But nothing I’ve seen makes it at all plausible that Japanese healthcare is cheaper than American because there’s more regulation in the US and less in Japan.