It would seem that a barrel of crude has a fixed price but not everyone (every country) buys it on the open market at current 'value'.
Mass transit is about the same, the difference is that Americans demand and get individuality and convenience (we drive everywhere) and pay a premium for that ability. Europeans use mass transit because they have to for a variety of reasons. So the often stated thought that 'we' should have nice, clean, efficient and <relatively> inexpensive mass transit systems here in the US as they do in, say, Germany is backwards. We have chosen individual transport and will not make use of mass transit....
Health care is a touchy subject (yeah, I see the pun but did not mean it). The realities just do not fit in with our social and moral wants and expectations. The fact is that it should be managed, just like every other aspect of life but we use emotion to drive the system. Some years ago I read the results of a study that showed more than 50% of all health care expenditure is in the last six weeks of life; this shows that we are basically throwing a huge amount of resources at something that almost always has the usual conclusion that cannot be altered. Some years ago Canada caught on to the realities of life and basically put a cap on medical spending; great for the economy, not so good for good ole' Uncle Louis who needs a new liver at 87 years of age. In the olden' days of, say, 100 years ago, medicine was limited by technology and so it was basically impossible to spend a great deal of money on it because of that limitation. Put simply, it was not possible to run up a $200,000 medical bill because there was just nothing technically available that was that expensive. Today, we have access to vast resources in medicine and medical treatment and the only way to deal with the economics of this is to limit how much is used by society. We can do that is a couple of ways but basically are now transitioning between an older method (not everyone has access to top level medical care, the classic capitalist method) to a more universal distribution which MUST result in universal limits in medical benefits for everyone. I am not going to get into that debate, and will not even share my opinions on the subject but basically, those are the two options we are struggling with right now.
Brian
The cost of gasoline is pretty stable everywhere. (depending on the price of a barrel of crude) Europeans pay more because of taxes. The cost of the product is about the same.
And I'm not implying that mass transit is the same. They have higher densities, and closer population centers that just don't work here. (for a lot of reasons)
Since I don't know anything about other countries health care delivery systems, I can't say anything, except that I wonder if our decision to let health care insurance companies make a 20% margin, (they only have to spend $0.80 of every $1 on actual care) is part of the reason we pay more an get less? Just asking.