I don't agree with your framing but let's accept it for the sake of this conversation.

The UK and Japan are not the only countries with more efficient healthcare systems than the US. We can look at a variety of countries, some of which have a higher GDP per capita than the US.

If we look at a graph of 'healthcare spending per capita' by 'GDP per capita' [1], we can see that the US is a massive outlier spending ~2x countries with comparable GDP per capita.

In fact, the US has a higher healthcare spending per capita than every other OECD country. By a large margin.

[1] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...

Japan is also way thingger than America, which the article points out: > The US spends ~$14,570 per person on healthcare. Japan spends ~$5,790 and has the highest life expectancy in the OECD. That gap is roughly $3 trillion per year.

Need to have people go in for checkups and get shamed for unhealthy habits, not really a money question.

Japan's economy imploded because it was doing better than the US and Japanese were buying big American names like Rockefeller Center, so the US forced Japan to destroy their currency, which popped the Asian miracle.