An Interesting Assertion

Mark Weisbrot, who writes for the Center for Economic and Policy Research, has an unusual take on the federal budget problems:

In the long run, there is a budget problem – but this is entirely due to health care spending.  If you pick any country with as high a life expectancy as ours, and plug their health care costs per person into our budget, our long-term budget deficit will disappear. So we just need to have normal health care costs – not budget cuts. 

Do you suppose this is true? That we grossly overpay for health care in comparison with other countries with developed medical systems? I wonder how much of this overpayment is due to the predation of the trial bar and the high costs of malpractice insurance?