Why is American health care so expensive?

I just got back from a couple of weeks in Old Fangak, a community of people living by the Zaraf River in South Sudan. It's normally a small community, with an open market and people who live by raising cows, trading on the river, fishing and gardening. Now there are tens of thousands of people there, still displaced from their homes by the civil war which has gone on intermittently for decades. There are even more people now than there were last year. There is a hospital in Old Fangak, which is run by Jill Seaman, one of the founders of Sudan Medical relief and a fierce advocate for treatment of various horrible and neglected tropical diseases, along with some very skilled and committed local clinical officers and nurses and a contingent of doctors, nurses and support staff from Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders, also known as MSF) who have been helping out for a little over a year. The hospital attempts to do a lot with a little, and treats all who present ther...

Mnemonics can be incredibly cool. When I was in medical school there was just too much stuff to remember and memory aids were so very helpful. Most specifically I refer to the vile and inappropriate one that helped me remember the cranial nerves which I remember to this day and will not share in print. In ancient times orators used memory palaces to memorize long speeches or poems, associating words with familiar and sometimes bizarre images. All this is to say that I have nothing against a good mnemonic. Lately though, as I have struggled to memorize a new acronym which is supposed to be good for me, I've been thinking about what makes a mnemonic good and what makes one annoyingly terrible. The most irritating mnemonic in recent experience is probably the "H's and T's" from Advanced Cardiac Life Support (ACLS). When a person's heart has ceased to be able to sustain life or blood pressure, we use a memorized sequence of interventions to resuscitate them, the A...

In the United States, biomedical research, including basic science and clinical studies, is paid for mainly by companies that expect to make money off of new discoveries. The government, through the National Institute of Health (NIH) funds a little over a quarter of it, but most of the money comes from drug and device manufacturers. This means that interesting research that might result in breakthroughs that save patients money is unlikely to find funding. This is terrible. If gummy bears cured cancer, we might never find out about it. If anything that is easy to come by, from various sources, were to show promise therapeutically, we as US citizens would not be likely to find out about it through our own research. Some examples: 1. Red yeast rice, a dietary supplement made of rice fermented with the fungus Monascus purpureus in a centuries old process, contains a widely marketed cholesterol medication (lovastatin) that is naturally produced by Monascus . The doses are high eno...

In July of 2015 the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved an injectable monoclonal antibody alirocumab (Praluent) which lowers the LDL or "bad cholesterol". The drug is produced by Regeneron, given by injection once every 2 weeks, and will cost $14,600 wholesale per year. In August, evolocumab (Repatha) was FDA approved. It, too, is a monoclonal antibody and will cost $14,100 wholesale when it is finally released. It was developed and will be marketed by Amgen. These drugs are antibodies, produced in hamster ovary cells in vats, which, when injected, bind to proprotein convertase subtilisin/kexin type 9 (PCSK9), making it less active. PCSK9 normally reduces the liver's ability to remove low density lipoprotein (LDL) from the blood. The main drug class that we have now which reduces LDL is the statins, also known as HMG CoA reductase inhibitors, which reduce the production of cholesterol. A couple of common statins are atorvastatin (Lipitor) and simvastatin (z...

Within the last two days I received a bill for my glasses and read a post by a friend ranting about medical billing mistakes. This is a huge problem that is so common that it could be considered the norm. It is ridiculously expensive and could probably be fixed. My exposure to medical bills has been through patients who show them to me, hoping I can make sense of them, my occasional foray into the world of being a healthcare consumer and the woes of friends and family. I can say, with confidence, that I have never read a medical bill that I understood. When I do choose to dig a bit deeper, overcharging and errors are more common than not. It is very hard to get good statistics on this, but the lower end of what I'm seeing suggests that one in 10 bills contain errors. It's probably higher than that. Common billing errors include being billed for procedures that were cancelled, being billed twice for the same thing, under different names, being billed for a more complex ...

I just read a disturbing article  about a recently completed study on treating high blood pressure. The SPRINT (systolic blood pressure intervention) trial was conducted at around 100 locations in the US and Puerto Rico, comparing treating blood pressure intensively to usual care. According to recently adopted guidelines, we now treat blood pressure with the goal of reducing the top number, the systolic blood pressure, to below 140 for adults younger than 60 and below 150 for those 60 an over. The goal for the bottom number, the diastolic blood pressure, is below 90. We recommend lifestyle changes, encouraging exercise, weight loss and reduction in salt intake, and use medications when the blood pressure stays too high. In the SPRINT trial, a comparison group was treated with blood pressure medications, sometimes 3 or more different types, to lower the systolic blood pressure below 120. The patients in the comparison group (more intensive treatment) apparently did better, with a ...

In 2003 the Medicare Modernization Act added a prescription drug plan to the benefits available to seniors and disabled adults. The act did a few other things, including introducing health savings accounts and defining Medicare Advantage Plans. The prescription drug plan rolled out in 2006, after which time seniors who bought the extra coverage had some help paying for their ever more expensive drugs. Today the government pays about $70 billion per year to provide this service, 11% of the total cost of Medicare. The purpose of Medicare Part D was to allow seniors, often the most financially vulnerable of our patients, to be able to afford to pay for medications without impoverishing themselves. Since medications are such an important part of treating the diseases of aging, the government hoped that seniors who were able to pay for necessary medications would be healthier, requiring fewer hospitalizations and emergency room visits. This improvement seemed likely to, at least partial...