That $35 is what consumers pay after insurance pays their share. That is heavily bloated over what other countries pay.
These prices are enforced by copyright/trademark/patent laws. There are generic insulins that are much cheaper and 99.5percent as effective, but good luck getting them in the US, since US endos won't prescribe them. They will only prescribe the newest most effective stuff (that gives them financial kickbacks, but surely that doesn't matter....) this helping to sustain insane prices.
Solution: eliminate patents on medication. A company should not be able to patent and restrict medicine production to increase their profits.
There are people who view any form of collective action via taxation as no different to slavery, as they had no choice in the matter. I get their viewpoint, but it's contradicted by everything they benefit from in society, like roads or education.
Healthcare, unlike houses or cars, is something everyone will get hit by eventually. The laws of supply and demand get heavily twisted because you can't train doctors and nurses on a whim, you need the right people, the right temperament, and years of training. The most responsible people can still get catastrophically sick, or get infections, and so on. Most of these diseases are also very time sensitive, which is the last place you should be thinking of profit motives.
Where he is right is the care. So long as you have money, the us system beats the living another out of everyone else. We wait days for what can take months or years otherwise. There are horror stories of people in Europe and Canada having to wait years only to find out their issue is now terminal.
There's also the indirect effects to consider, a healthier population can work harder and make more. They can take more risks since if their business goes under they don't lose medical coverage. It frees people from the corporate yoke, and more centralized systems can realize huge cost savings on paperwork alone.
