Yeah definitely, the US system is very dysfunctional. A good amount of money simply gets lost in the bureaucracy.

Insurance companies are massive conglomerates that have to negotiate deals with tens of thousands of providers, millions of products, and millions of customers. Every Healthcare provider needs dedicated bureaucrats that can navigate the sea of paperwork. I don't have the data in front of me, but I believe the US government pays about the same amount of money on healthcare as the Swedish government.

Any difference between what a Swede pays and what an American pays is just pure waste. A wasteland of pointless jobs.

There's definitely some fuskbolag and dysfunctionalities in the Swedish system, but for the most part, Swedes are not wasting money keeping dozens of massive office towers filled with bureaucrats, and Swedes have a happier life because of it.

With regards to salary, all Americans already pay 4% off their paycheck for Medicare. So Swedes don't have lower salaries because of vård välfärd - at least not directly. But that's a complicated discussion, and we're already seeing American salaries fall drastically due to geopolitical factors. There is some aspect of the US having a monopoly on cloud services, where many top European tech works have been bought up and poached by Silicon Valley. There is also the risk of the American economy overinvesting into AI companies, with hundreds of billions of dollars already spent, and further trillions planned.