We also spend around way more per capita on health care than any other country. I bet both health care and defense expenditures could be reduced significantly if they were run with at least a little efficiency and less profit making by middlemen.
Depending on who you categorize as "middlemen", this health analysis is a common misconception: our outsized health care spending comes from providers, not insurers/payers. We just do more procedures (we lead the world in making procedures doable quickly and outpatient-ly) and pay our medical staff more.
Agreed, there's not some organization taking a fat cut, it's a matter of overall demand, namely subsidized demand. We hamstring our healthcare supply in a variety of ways while massively juicing demand, which leads to increased prices.
America spends $4.5t a year on healthcare[0].
~$2t of that comes from the government directing taxed dollars towards healthcare for certain classes, per my previous comment in this thread. If your goal is to reduce our per-capita healthcare spending I see a fairly brutal and swift solution that would halve our spending, and put us below most European countries[1].
This is conjecture on my part, but I would imagine the remaining spending would also fall as the consumers have to bid less money for access to the healthcare resources that are newly freed up.
Further conjecture, I believe we may be able to have our cake and eat it too if we reduce the years of study necessary to start practicing medicine, and reduce our roadblocks to importing foreign-trained doctors. The UK may be trying something similar[2].
If you work the numbers out based on expected utilization levels, extending Medicare to all residents in the United States gets you an administrative overhead fraction that resembles that of private health insurance, so I'm skeptical that insurance has much to do with it.
it would be nice if America could do the minimum that the rest of NATO theoretically agree to and spend just 2% of GDP on defense. Right now that figure is 2.9%.
Consider that most industrialized countries would have nukes by now if the US hadn't guaranteed to come to their aid if they are attacked by a nuclear power in exchange for their not trying to acquire nukes.