[ElmntOfSurprise]

The charts are not really "Why Americans Spend Much on Health Care", just "Americans Spend Much on Health Care (or More than Others and More than They Used To, Anyway)". Believable causes that I have read being suggested are "demographics", "lack of single payer health care", "unhealthy lifestyle", "inefficient allocation of resources towards terminally ill patients", "Americans pay for drug research that inhabitants of other countries get for free", "expensive safeguards against malpractice lawsuits". Lobbying, taxation and opacity to consumers seems like a poor explanation of why healthcare in the US is so much more expensive than in other countries, and more expensive than in the past.