First of all:
"the United States is Cambodia or Burkina Faso or rural India, with access to a doctor available if you can pay the bill out-of-pocket"
Although it dovetails with the well worn narrative on HN, this comparison fails due to the level of care.
Also, from the article comments:
"There are just a couple problems. In 2009, the French Society of Radiology equipment in France was critically undermining care, and the government was refusing to increase capacity, even though people at many emergency rooms couldn't get an MRI even if they needed one because the equipment simply wasn't available. So, yes, the French government has held down the price of MRIs in France...by not purchasing enough MRI machines that one is available at every hospital. If you need an MRI in France, you're rolling the dice that you would be able to get one in a timely fashion.
Second, some of the development of MRI technology happened in Britain. Most was performed in the U.S. Who is paying for the cost of development of this and other new technology and drugs? It's often not the people in places like Canada and France, where government controls hold down prices. Most of the cost of research and development is paid for by Americans. We pay perhaps five times more in the U.S. for some procedures than people in France pay, but the technology might not exist in the first place if we didn't pay this disproportionate share. Once the technology exists, companies keep charging as much as they can in the U.S. to recoup costs and to fund development of the next big thing in medicine, and meanwhile other countries in the world adopt the technology, gaining benefits from it without actually paying the costs. This is Canada, France, and much of Europe. Plenty of medical research goes on in these countries, but American consumers ultimately bear most of the cost. It's an unfair system in many respects, but it's what has kept medical research moving ahead for the last several decades."