[lmm]

> Basically nobody has money for "custom treatment" -- it takes years to do medical research, if not decades, with no guarantee that it will pan out before you die.

No-one has money for original research, sure, but there's a level that's above "going to the place you would normally be referred to for condition x" where you instead go to the best hospital in the world for condition x, get treated by the world leading expert on condition x, etc.. And that level is not generally covered by regular people's medical insurance in the US, nor by public healthcare systems in other industrialised countries.

> The rich people in other countries come to the US to get largely the same treatment as ordinary people in the US with insurance get, and it's not for no reason.

They do? Are there really more people coming to the US for medical treatment than other wealthy industrialized countries, once you control for size? (Like, I'm sure "the best hospital in the world for condition x" is in the US more often than it's in Switzerland, just as a function of there being more people and hospitals in the US, but I'd be surprised if that's still true once you control for that). And are the institutions they go to really accessible to regular people with in-network rules etc.?