I figured it out myself when I traveled. The airfares in Europe and the Middle East are surprisingly affordable. I bought asthma inhalers in Lebanon, Turkey and Spain for about $3 each. Equivalent medicine in the US costs $85 per inhaler, $120 if you don’t have insurance.
I was primed to notice an excellent Article in The Atlantic, “The U.S. Only Pretends to Have Free Markets.” Here’s an excerpt:
Internet service, cellphone plans, and plane tickets are now much cheaper in Europe and Asia than in the United States, and the price differences are staggering. In 2018, according to data gathered by the comparison site Cable, the average monthly cost of a broadband internet connection was $29 in Italy, $31 in France, $32 in South Korea, and $37 in Germany and Japan. The same connection cost $68 in the United States, putting the country on par with Madagascar, Honduras, and Swaziland. American households spend about $100 a month on cellphone services, the Consumer Expenditure Survey from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates. Households in France and Germany pay less than half of that, according to the economists Mara Faccio and Luigi Zingales.
Let’s not even talk about insulin. Pharmaceutical companies and insurance have driven the price of this medicine to obscene heights in the US. People are making choices between eating and having life saving meds. In some countries, insulin costs less than $20. Free markets? There are only three companies allowed to sell insulin in the US due to ignorant trademark laws. A Canadian discovered insulin and gave it away because he felt people needed it. Now the market is abused because pharmaceutical companies are allowed to lock this product down to where a free market can’t exist!