Empirics prove the current system is cost ineffective—SP lowers [drug?] costs through more effective mechanisms.

Rising per capita costs of health care in the United States: National health expenditure (NHE) in the United States grew by 4.6% in 2018, to $3.65 trillion ($11,172 per capita).[1] This accounted for 17.7% of the gross domestic product (GDP) at the time.[1,2] The United States spends the most by far on health care among all 36 countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), both as a proportion of GDP and per capita.[3,4] Despite using fewer health care resources, the country spends $2,000 more per person than the next-highest-spending country, Switzerland, and nearly twice as much per capita on health care as the median for OECD countries.[3,5] The pricing system is inherently the single greatest driver of health care costs while providing fewer key health resources.[3] There is also a large and widening gap in the prices that public and private payers are charged for identical services, which indicates that the rising total NHE is primarily driven by private health care insurers[3] and pharmaceutical expenditures in particular.[6]  U.S. pharmaceutical expenditures: U.S. prescription drug expenditures reached $335 billion in 2018, a 28% increase in a decade.[6] The growth is expected to continue and is projected to increase 67.3% to $560 billion by 2028.[6] In 2018, annual per capita U.S. prescription drug spending was $1,221, well above that of the United Kingdom ($526), Sweden ($534), and Germany ($884).[7] Prescription drug expenditures alone will represent 19.7% of the U.S. GDP by 2028.[6] Increased prescription drug expenditures will be largely driven by manufacturers’ increases in drug prices.[8]  One of the distinctions in U.S. prescription policy is the burden of drug costs borne by patients as out-of-pocket costs. For instance, the Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit has no cap on out-of-pocket costs for beneficiaries.[9] Drug prices are significantly higher in the United States than in any other OECD country. By contrast, the United Kingdom requires little or no cost sharing by patients. Countries that have implemented single-payer (SP) financing systems offer multiple examples of ways to reduce drug prices, including harmonization of pharmaceutical coverage, pricing over a single formulary or across formularies, exclusion of added administrative costs from pharmacy benefit managers, and leveraging of scale to negotiate prices with suppliers.