A poll of Massachusetts residents found that regular people in Massachusetts understand why their health care is so extremely expensive. It’s because they have to pay too much for drugs, insurance and hospital care, compared to what other nations pay.

Looking at how the incentives in our health care market are currently set up, there is little reason to hope the “market” will magically come up with innovations to reduce our national health care spending. It is no surprise given looking at our structural innovation issues that for decades we have seen health care cost grow so rapidly.

As you can see in this helpful chart from the Kaiser Family Foundation, America pays much more for health care than any other first-world country.

There are a lot of false ideas or very minor explanations that are overstated to try to justify why we pay so much.

Not only is Republican Paul Ryan’s Medicare privatization plan using basically the same general premium-supported exchange design that Obama’s health care revision does for the uninsured under 65, but both Ryan’s budget and “Obamacare” are nearly totally reliant on almost the same pathetic accounting trick of using poorly indexed caps on federal health care spending in the distant future to produce the bulk of their supposed deficit reductions.