U.S. in order to obtain, and what treatments people are coming to the U.S. to obtain. This is a crucial piece of the picture you're trying to paint. People leave the U.S. for medical care because it's *cheaper*, not because it's *better*. The reason medical care is expensive in the U.S. is fairly simple: 1) Higher healthcare costs result in a higher number of people who are uninsured. 2) People who are uninsured use sources of healthcare that are a drain on the industry - either Medicare/Medicaid, who don't pay their bills, or else use emergency rooms as primary care. 3) These costs are then passed on to the people who actually pay for healthcare, increasing the cost of healthcare. 4) Repeat (until we're all out of money). The root cause of increased cost of healthcare *is* government regulation. Remember all those "well-intentioned" state laws that don't allow health insurance companies to sell cheap, but limited, policies ("minimum coverage" laws)? That's cause #1. Cause #2 are government subsidies to companies for buying health care for their employees. We, even those of us who don't work for companies that provide healthcare, pay for those subsidies with money that we could be otherwise using to buy our own healthcare. Point is, don't require minimum coverage for a policy, and don't subsidize (at the expense of the individual citizen) companies who buy healthcare in bulk. Also, force our system of existing socialized medicine to pay its bills, and if it runs out of