why healthcare costs so much

I had a most enlightening chit chat with a good friend of mine.  We will call him... "Rayqwan Jose Peters", but "Ray" for short (to protect my friend's true identity, I changed hist name to a racially ambiguous smorgasbord).

ANYway, Ray works for a large hospital now and is currently in an MHA program.  In short, Ray knows his stuff when it comes to healthcare.  But that's not all, his current job in the large hospital chain is to determine the cost of new services.  Ray decides how much you and I will pay for our healthcare.

I made a visual for what he told me.  I was fascinated.  He didn't use the example of a shower, but I thought I would.

So here's what I took away:  healthcare is so expensive because half of the patients in the U.S. are on government aid, a program which doesn't reimburse hospitals for what they need to have a viable business model.  To stay in existence hospitals are forced to charge people who pay twice as much.  Let me put this in other words:

We are taxed through our healthcare payments.

Here's another way to put it:

We fund medicare and medicaid when we go to the doctor.

I totally understand the motives behind government assistance programs.  Helping others who cannot help themselves is a great source of joy for me in my life.  I also don't feel comfortable being forced (in yet another way) to incentivize dependency. Unfortunately,  I don't have a solution to the problem.  Hopefully whoever's president will figure it out.