Is it the government or just everyone? I have heard that the American healthcare system is more expensive as a whole than the UK's, but I think that was how much Americans pay directly and through government funding.
Our cost per procedure is higher. See, in our system, it's expected that your insurance company will wrangle the price down. And they do. Routinely. However, if you don't
have insurance, or you've run out of what your insurance will cover in a year, or some other variant on having to pay for it out-of-pocket, there's no one to wrangle it down for you. You just pay what they charge you. I'm not sure if it's possible to negotiate directly with the hospital or not. But it means that Americans end up getting charged insanely high prices for things that they could literally walk down the block and buy themselves for a tiny, tiny fraction of the price--the amount you're charged for even simple things like gauze pads and aspirin in a hospital results from the usual practice of the hospital and the insurance company negotiating for a more sensible price.
I actually had an employer who provided health care once, when I still had a job. It was officially designated as "supplemental" insurance. It paid up to $300 a year for office visits, and no more than (as I recall) $40 per visit. As I was trying to calculate how much therapy that would cover in a year (just enough to trigger my abandonment issues, was what I worked out), I was told this wouldn't cover mental health. Which, for the record, is one of the changes in the new health care laws. Insurance
must cover mental health care. Because it's an illness. Oh, and of course no one where I worked could afford insurance to supplement; the only people who had insurance were either young enough to still be on their parents' insurance (and under the new laws, the age where you can do
that has gone up!) or poor enough, despite working a full-time job, to qualify for Medicaid.