From the World War II times when health insurance was first started in the U.S.,

I think there's just no accountability in terms of keeping prices in check to now we have this

massive conglomerate industry that's setting these prices without any type of transparency and no

accountability.

A full 50% of Americans carry medical debt, according to a 2021 report by Debt.com.

With numbers like that, it's no wonder why universal health care coverage is such a popular

proposal with American voters. But why is health care in the U.S. so expensive compared to

other countries? And what can we do

to bring down those costs without compromising on quality? Today, we sit down with Will Brune,

the co-founder and COO at Global Appropriateness Measures, to discuss one simple change that could

save Americans millions. Will, thanks so much for joining me.

Good to be here. Thank you. So first off, I want to get something clear for some people.

I think the medical system in general is very opaque to a lot of people, especially the billing side of it.

So can you explain briefly how medical billing works and how we got into the situation where

we're being charged extraordinary prices for very generic services? So for example, I think you cited

in your Prager-U video, some hospitals have been known to charge up to $100 for one generic aspirin.

How did we get there? Yeah, it's a great question. And something I think

a lot of smart people are trying to understand and fix. And I think the way we got there is this long

history of not holding our health care system accountable to what they were charging. You know,

it's been this pretty slow progression now to where we are at with this

pretty catastrophic level of costs on health care towards the American population. And so

I think it's just been this stepwise, you know, from World War II times when health insurance

...