> US residents pay a lot for healthcare, and that's used to fund healthcare research.

I'd really like to see a source for that, because that's far from obvious to me. I could see that being true for pharmaceuticals, but then there's a lot more to health care than just drugs.

In the US, health care seems more like the Parkinson's law of the economy: health care costs expand to suck up much (most?) of the economic surplus that results from any improvements in overall productivity.