I think you may be confusing me with someone who gives a shit about arguing economics with you.
In other words, "I don't have any substantive objections and my sole contribution here is to blithely paste links to widely cited documents that just about everyone has already seen". Why even bother?
I'll rely on McKinsey and Stiglitz, thanks.
I'll take science over expertise any day. I am especially wary when the so-called expert analysis is a little more than the rudimentary analysis of a bunch of kids fresh out of school with only a skin-deep exposure to these topics (I have known many such people, including peers of these authors, and while most of them are reasonably intelligent people, their bluster far exceeds their subject matter expertise).
As for Stiglitz, he has not published anything on healthcare and shared any sort of rigorous analysis, so far as I can tell, so I see no reason to defer to his professed (left wing) preferences. He has, however, published stuff closer to his knitting with Amartya Sen, Jean-Paul Fitouss, and others that pertains to the discussion. Indeed, they recommend AIC and AHDI over and above GDP as an indicator of material living conditions.
Here are just a few instructive quotes:
"GDP mainly measures market production.... However, it has often been treated as if it were a measure of economic well-being. Conflating the two can lead to misleading indications about how well-off people are...Material living standards are more closely associated with measures of net national income, real household income and consumption – production can expand while income decreases or vice versa when account is taken of depreciation, income flows into and out of a country, and differences between the prices of output and the prices of consumer products.
[snip]
In a world of globalization, there may be large differences between the income of a country’s citizens and measures of domestic production, but the former is clearly more relevant for measuring the well-being of citizens...the household sector is particularly relevant for our considerations, and for households the income perspective is much more appropriate than measures of production.
[snip]
While it is informative to track the performance of economies as a whole, trends in citizens’ material living standards are better followed through measures of household income and consumption. Indeed, the available national accounts data shows that in a number of OECD countries real household income has grown quite differently from real GDP per capita, and typically at a lower rate. The household perspective entails taking account of payments between sectors, such as taxes going to government, social benefits coming from government, and interest payments on household loans going to financial corporations.
[snip]
Properly defined, household income and consumption should also reflect in-kind services provided by government, such as subsidized health care and educational services. A major effort of statistical reconciliation will also be required to understand why certain measures such as household income can move differently depending on the underlying statistical source"
Also, you mention Legatum as a data source
As a source? No, I don't think you don't understand. These services, of which Legatum is just one, have helpfully aggregated a wide variety of indicators from various 3rd parties that measure the sorts of lives that people live (health, happiness, material conditions, etc) and these indicators are overwhelmingly better predicted by household measures like AIC, the same measures that Stiglitz et al recommend, than GDP.
For instance:
Social Progress Index: r-squared and OLS.
World Happiness Survey: r-squared and OLS
Legatum: r-squared and OLS
The point, to be clear, is not that (self-reported) happiness or what have you causes more health spending, but that AIC and AHDI actually measure the household perspective and that these measures are theoretically and empirically more robust predictors of the behavior of a society than domestic production levels (GDP). Overwhelmingly, GDP only predicts "good" outcomes to the extent it predicts the household perspective, but once we have robust household measures (e.g., AIC, AHDI, etc) GDP tends to be insignificant to even a net negative on the margins (i.e., conditional on AIC, countries with more net exports, CFC, etc don't enjoy significantly better outcomes and often do worse in the great majority of cases)
In other words, it is not just luck that AIC or AHDI fully mediate GDP with respect to HCE, as we find the same patterns with just about anything else of significance, and these same measures quite well explain why the US spends as much as it does. Whether or not high US spending is "worth it" is another question entirely, but the evidence suggests this spending is not substantially a result of idiosyncratic features of the US health spending and that other countries behave very similarly with respect to the household perspective (despite essentially no relationship between spending and life expectancy amongst the OECD)