Highly Efficient Healthcare Systems at Extremely Low Prices? Is that a Utopia?

As if all this government-generated red-tape was not enough, the insurance companies profit on the volume of claims, not the type of service. It is not difficult to understand why healthcare is so expensive in the U.S. The market incentives simply get lost in the middle of such great inefficiency. Singapore is also at the forefront when it comes to drug approvals. Any medication or device is authorized for public use, as long as it has already been cleared by any major foreign regulatory agency, such as the FDA in the U.S. or the European Medicines Agency, in Europe. Unlike the current FDA protocols, in Singapore, the only requirement for a drug to be commercialized is its safety to humans. The logic behind this approach is quite simple: the medicine that fails to work as previously advertised will also fail in the marketplace. Something similar was true in the U.S. up until the 1960s when FDA internal guidelines were drastically changed, and many of them purposely ended up helping protect big pharmaceutical companies in the country.