Tyler Cowen writes a useful summary of our healthcare system’s costs & productivity vs other nations:

The relevant measures were either life expectancy after treatment or measures of the quality of life. And how about the results:
The United States is more productive in all these diseases except for diabetes in the United Kingdom. [emphasis added] The reasons for this result can be traced directly to the huge differences in the way the health care sector is organized and governed across these three countries. The UK health care system is almost entirely government owned and run…The result has been that the United Kingdom has no invested as quickly in technologies that have dramatically improved the diagnostic capabilities of medicine and significantly reduced recovery time…Germany, on the other hand, has a system more like the United States had twenty years ago. In Germany, medical expenses are paid for on a task-by-task basis for services of doctors and hospitals. As a result, hospitals in Germany have no financial incentive to reduce length of stay.