- doctors are paid higher in the US than in another countries

- billing staff overhead because of the insane insurance system

- highly paid hospital administration

- lots of middlemen that stay invisible because there is no price transparency

- shiny new buildings that are built by friends of the hospital administration

- Gold plating everything to avoid getting sued.

- Inflated medical school costs

- the price of a huge bureaucracy for billing people, chasing them, disputing it, agreeing rates with insurers, renegotiating rates with insurers, applying the right discounts, billing a dozen different state and federal programs for various bits, those being disputed, managing all that etc.

If you spent $0 on drugs next year, we would not save that much money.

If you want to cut spending, you need to cut spending on doctors and hospitals.

If you want sources for these numbers, here is the National Health Expenditure summary from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Studies:

https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Sta...

Big pharma has actually reduced the hospitalization costs over the past two decades.

Edit: can someone explain downvotes?. How is big pharma increasing hospital costs?

please take a look at this, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2669633/

"The major empirical finding from this research is that medication use by Medicare beneficiaries is significantly negatively associated with hospital spending. Moreover, the cross-effect is quite large: each additional prescription drug fill reduces hospital costs by slightly more than $100 or about 5 percent measured at the mean level of Medicare payments in 2000 for inpatient hospital services for study subjects. "