Why is American health care so expensive?

I hear many of my progressive friends say that "obviously what we need is a single payer." That could work, but it is definitely not a sure thing. Overall what we want most is universal access to healthcare at a cost that is affordable. Why, some may ask, does it need to be affordable? Why can't it just be free, like in Canada? That's a wonderful thought, sort of. It also ignores the big truth that healthcare is like any other resource and is not free. It is always paid for by all of us. The difference between a single payer and multiple public and private payers, which we have now, is the degree to which we feel the pain of paying for it. Healthcare costs are paid by our employers, and thus from our wages, our taxes and directly from our purses in the forms of premiums and copays. There are problems with universal access to healthcare, too. As a nation of people with various values, it is probably safe to say that most of us want sick people to be able to go ...

After writing about the coming demise of the Affordable Care Act , I began to think, again, about why it costs so much to deliver healthcare in this country. If it was cheaper, legislation to make healthcare a right, rather than the randomly distributed privilege it is now, would be so much easier. Medical costs doubled every decade from 1960 through 2000. This happened in tandem with the rise of comprehensive health insurance. Today the vast majority of health care is paid for by some sort of health insurance. Hospitals and physicians spend a huge amount of time generating information to convince insurance companies to pay us. Patients aren't usually aware that more than half of the time doctors or nurses spend at work is used to document what we do. These days it is primarily on a computer. The documentation can be helpful to communicate our thoughts and plans to colleagues or keep a record of what happened so we can create a history that caregivers can read at some future t...

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA for short, or Obamacare as it has come to be known) was passed on March 23, 2010 after intense wrangling and many compromises. It is a huge and complex bill  which changed health insurance costs and availability significantly, resulting in over 20 million Americans getting health insurance who were previously uninsured. Many people can now get health care without impoverishing themselves, but the bill is also not without significant and possibly fatal flaws. What does it do? The link here is to a blog I wrote in early 2010 after a grueling 5 hours of reading the bill that was eventually passed. The things people like about it include: Health insurance can be bought through "exchanges" which make it easy to compare plans and purchase insurance.  The wording of policies has to be understandable for regular people.  An insurance company can't refuse to cover a patient because of a pre-existing condition and insura...

This weeks issue if the JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) reads like an expose. At least 3 of the research articles do. So exciting. I don't want medicine, my field, to be ethically unsavory, but it is sometimes. It makes me proud to see that it sometimes polices itself and that such information is published in a high profile journal. The first article is entitled "Patient Advocacy Organizations, Industry Funding and Conflict of Interest" by Susanna Rose of the Cleveland Clinic along with colleagues of hers from the University of Chicago. It turns out that 67% of  patient advocacy organizations such as the American Diabetic Association, the Multiple Sclerosis Foundation and March of Dimes, organizations that support patients with various diseases, receive support from industry. Specifically "industry" means organizations that make money by selling products related to health. More than one in 10 of these organizations received over half of t...

Early in December Congress came together in bipartisan support of HR 6, the "20th Century Cures Act." So unusual, these days, for a "landmark bill" to pass into law without major objections by Democrats or Republicans. Perhaps something fishy was going on. Perhaps this was a chance to please special interests while making the average voter feel that, at last, congress was going to accomplish something good. The bill was hailed as supporting the development of new drugs and devices to cure dread diseases by reducing unnecessary regulation by the Food and Drug Administration. I found the text . It is amazingly difficult to read. The legal terminology is nearly impenetrable and the actual content is pretty hard to discern. It is also full of barely related measures, some of them excellent and some of them likely to have nasty consequences. I am particularly wary of the provision that encourages use of digital medical imaging by paying less and less for tests done w...

A couple of weeks ago I started taking medicine to lower my blood pressure and another to reduce my cholesterol. This was a controversial move, given my deep distrust of the practice of medicine, when it is practiced on me, and pharmaceuticals in particular. I know that, as a woman of 55 with an very active and healthy lifestyle, no chronic diseases and most importantly as a nonsmoker, I am at very low risk for any of the conditions that high blood pressure or high cholesterol could cause to happen. I am unlikely to have a stroke or a heart attack, develop narrowing of the arteries to my legs or develop kidney failure. The blood pressure and cholesterol levels have no effect at all on how healthy I feel. But one day, while pointing an ultrasound probe at my own neck, I saw a small plaque (a thickened area) in my left carotid artery. It was very calcified, which meant that it had been there a long while, but my carotid was not pristine. It is undeniable: I have vascular disease. Wil...

The last year has been difficult to watch, and the last few months even more so. News and quasi-news organizations have been bombarding my email with stories about the people vying for our presidency. It has been anywhere from difficult to completely impossible to screen this information for accuracy. Lies and information taken out of context and repeated until it seems true has been part of both party's rhetoric. The whole field of potential candidates were infected with it before the primary elections. The emotions have been high, too. By the time the election finally happened on November 8th, we had a comic book villain straight out of the Batman movies running against Satan in female form. The outcome has left people deeply sad and frightened, even people who voted for the winner. There is hope, too, and kindness and gathering together. There is huge uncertainty. I've been alive for 13 presidential elections, and this one was really different. This is partly because o...