I can't answer for everywhere, but what I saw was made by Cipla, an Indian concern.

As much as I enjoyed detesting President GW Bush, PEPFAR (Bush's AIDS spending) was not a subsidy to American pharmaceutical manufacturers. If anything, PEPFAR resulted in rapid approval of many new generic drugs for AIDS antiviral therapy (see http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/304/3/313.full). To wit,

An existing US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) mechanism for approving premarket generic drugs was identified and modified for the purpose of qualifying ARVs for use in PEPFAR programs. The process, FDA tentative approval, included expedited review that allowed the FDA to rapidly evaluate antiretroviral drugs from any manufacturer internationally, and to issue approval for use in PEPFAR programs if the ARVs met FDA standards of safety, efficacy, and manufacturing quality.

As a physician who spent one long autumn working in an AIDS clinic in Kampala prior to what the Ugandans called "the Bush program," and watching most of my affected patients be marked for certain death... and then celebrating along with them the long overdue arrival of lifesaving therapy with PEPFAR's implementation, I owe that frustrating Texan a debt of gratitude.

In the United States, nearly every practitioner would be forbidden from charging for a weight/height/BP check unless we also determine you've got a blood pressure problem requiring some sort of treatment.

Similarly, to charge for most any office visit, the government and private payers require vitals (including weight/height/blood pressure) in order to bill for most visits —in addition to checking whatever else you're being seen for. There is no additional charge to check your vital signs. It's like getting tap water at the restaurant.

We set a "reasonable and customary" charge for each procedure at a rate that, once negotiated down to some piddling price by private insures, Medicare and Medicaid, still allows us to pay the staff salaries and keep the lights on. It's only been recently that it's been permissible to provide a "cash discount" to uninsured folks in the otherwise perverse system that required us to charge uninsured people more than just about anyone else.

In the US, we do import many doctors from third world countries, largely to fill positions in rural areas and to take primary care jobs that US graduates think aren't really worth having since in many places it's fairly hard to make a living doing so unless you're part of a gigantic group with sufficient negotiating power with payers. As a side effect of this, the US gets third world countries in desperate need of local physicians to pay for their education, and then they end up here, serving us.

Most of the US doctors I know (I'm a primary care guy, so that's who I know) with their own practices have plenty of conscience, who end up putting practice expenses on their own credit cards, and more and more are giving up the business. In our city (Portland, Oregon), even the private oncology, cardiology, and just last month cardiothoracic surgery groups are giving up going it alone.

Our group is happy about the Affordable Care Act, and so is just about every other primary physician group I know in these parts. (It's not universally true; those opposed, however, seem to be opposed on philosophical grounds of independence, which is increasingly difficult given consolidation in the insurance industry.)

Oy vey. Europe spends less then we do on health care —even less than we do on government-paid-for health care; see the OECD data referenced in the comments above. Greece's economy is going down the tubes because they seem to have a cultural problem paying taxes (sound familiar, fellow Americans) and because upon adoption of the euro they borrowed a bunch of money they cannot easily pay back. They didn't obviously borrow it on health care (I'm aware of no data stating that Greek health care spending has gone up significantly sinc etheir economy has tanked); they borrowed it on Mercedes and vacation homes. (Does that sound familiar?) This caused a crisis in confidence in Greek bonds, and later those of other non-German nations (Portugal, Spain, and Italy). Enjoy this recent fascinating episode of WBEZ/Chicago's This American Life for details.

It's a fair question (in the US, anyway) to ask us how much a procedure costs, but each procedure has multiple components with different prices set by negotiation with each insurance company, and a separate amount for uninsured patients, often with a modest discount. Insurance companies consider the negotiated prices proprietary; if they were posted, doctors could collude in setting prices (which is illegal).

Your insurance company changes these prices each year, and does not make them available for ready viewing by physicians, as that is not to their advantage. Your insurance company also sets deductibles and copays, and doesn't tell us what they are or how paid up your are on them. When we try to call your insurance company to figure this out, we get put on hold for 20 minutes (just like you) and as often as not are told we need to fill out form 2204-09, available on their website hosted in North Korea, to get permission to access information about your particular plan in order to make some guess about how much you're going to owe based on the procedure we think you're going to need and the particular agreement your plan has with our office.

If your physician gets paid right away by your insurance company, s/he is truly blessed. The insurance folks have 30 days to mull over the payment, and then can contest this and that and claim the diagnosis code needs another procedure code and so forth, with several weeks turnaround each time on muddied fax; they have little incentive to pay promptly. I can assure you they make as many mistakes paying us as they do billing you. And then we get to send you revised bills based on their (often) capricious decisions.

When patients call our office complaining about a bill, my preferred response is typically "fine," since I'd rather not spend another 40 minutes on the phone with your insurance company asking why the $120 we charged to remove your pre-cancerous mole shouldn't be bundled into the $10 toenail removal we did 2 months ago, and the 3 pages of paperwork designed in Kyrgyzstan where I can try to justify our billing to some insurance company bureaucrat. So we can get the $43 your insurance company has negotiated the $120 procedure down to. For the work we already did. I expect if we made your auto mechanic go through this bullshit 20 times a day they might just kill themselves with an air compressor.

It's not just Apple; all US workers are more productive than workers anywhere else in the world, where productivity is measured in terms of revenue generated per worker. For Apple, this may be based on cheap Chinese labor (though the expense of the labor in China versus the US doesn't seem to be the main reason iPhones are made in Shenzhen; it's because the rest of the supply chain and a huge supply of middle-skilled workers are there). But Foxconn's productivity is still likely dwarfed by Apple's; manufacturing is not where the profits are - Apple has demonstrated good design gets the high margins. It just hasn't lead to a lot of jobs for mid-level US workers.

That makes Apple's US workers more productive than Foxconn's Chinese laborers. I think you may be conflating productivity and employment. Apple's model (of doing the design and marketing themselves, and farming out the manufacturing to lower-margin contractors) just doesn't require that many workers, leading to low unemployment in Shenzhen and high unemployment in Detroit (and the US manufacturing sector in general).

Whether we could duplicate the manufacturing supply chain in the US is another matter, even if we could convince US workers to work (and live) under conditions like those at Foxconn. (Foxconn chairman compares his workforce to ‘animals’ .)

In terms of economic output per worker, American workers really are the most productive in the world (even the TFA cites $400,000/y/worker at Apple). See http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2011/fortune/1109/gallery.america_economic_strengths.fortune/2.html, which also notes that part of this is due to US worker's long hours - Norway has the most productive workers per hours worked.

While this may vary from state to state, as far as I am aware in the US, medical records belong to the physician or their institution: that's what I learned in medical school and residency. This looks to be the same in Canada, as well (http://www.cba.org/bc/public_media/health/421.aspx).

(http://www.mbc.ca.gov/consumer/complaint_info_questions_records.html#10)

And, from "The Encyclopedia of Everyday Law," (http://www.enotes.com/healthcare-reference/medical-records)

I can't speak to lawyerly records however, as I didn't go to law school.

As a doctor, I really think of your medical record as mine: what I gleaned from your complaints, what exams I did, who I talked to, and what I thought was going on and what to do about it. I know you are paying for it, but I'm the one doing the work and putting all that medical school to use.
That said, I think you should have access to it, for free, and modern electronic health records allow that: once I review a result or record I can release it so you can look at it online. I also now document in my charts with the idea that the patient or family member might read it, so in addition to the technical detail I write the plan and diagnosis in as plain language as possible, and send patients home with this at each visit. (More than half immediately lose this paperwork, in my experience.) These systems, naturally, come at significant, expense and require a fair amount of upkeep, so they are mostly available only at larger practices.
Having worked previously in a developing nation where patients were responsible for keeping their own medical records (on 5 x 8 index cards), I'm glad we don't do it that way here (I'm n the US). I need a secure copy of what's been done to you and what you're taking, and recall having had a lot of trouble reconstructing lost information from the memory of illiterate folks or damaged records that had gotten submerged in open sewers and whatnot.

For those playing along at home, Michael is referring to Toxic Shock Syndrome (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_shock_syndrome), which occurred in some cases with the Rely super-absorbent tampon, no longer on the market for this reason. And, tampon boxes in the US now include warnings not to use tampons continuously and to watch out for fever (http://www.nytimes.com/1982/06/22/us/us-sets-new-rules-for-warning-labels-on-tampon-boxes.html).

It's not clear to me if Michael (and his various dogs and guns - see his fascinating journal!) is advocating for a stronger FDA or a weaker one (based on their inability to predict all potential hazards of all medical devices and drugs); I think this is a clear example of a government agency doing its job and preventing significant harm among its citizens.