Why is American health care so expensive?

I finally finished reading the many journals piled up on my dining room table, which have been shunted to other flat surfaces for projects or the visits of friends. I didn't read them all well, but I touched them all and read what interested me. The early October edition of the Annals of Internal Medicine particularly caught my eye. There were two major articles that looked at determinants of health in a slightly different way. The first used data from the Cleveland Clinic's electronic medical record to see whether the standard prediction calculator that we use to estimate a person's risk for cardiovascular disease works as well in poor as in not-poor neighborhoods. They found that it did not work nearly as well in poor neighborhoods. In fact, whether you have a heart attack or stroke is more determined by whether you live in a poor area of town than whether you have the traditional collection of risk factors for heart disease such as high blood pressure, smoking, di...

Sepsis is one of the most common diagnoses in our hospital that leads to admission to the intensive care unit. Sepsis is the syndrome that comes from uncontrolled, usually bacterial, infection and is not uncommonly fatal. Bacteria are everywhere and live in and on us, in balance with each other and supporting our bodily functions. Occasionally they invade our tissues resulting in infection. The body responds by releasing white blood cells which kill the bacteria by various mechanisms including producing chemicals that make us feel sick. These chemicals raise our temperature, cause our blood vessels to dilate, lowering our blood pressure and raising our heart and breathing rates. Sometimes this whole process causes kidney, heart and lung failure as well as delirium. The infections that can cause sepsis can involve all kinds of bacteria or other microorganisms and start in any of a large number of areas including the skin, lungs, kidneys, brain and abdominal organs. Our usual treatme...

Estrogen is a miracle drug for many women who experience the drenching sweats, sexual dysfunction and frustrating brain betrayals associated with entering menopause. It comes in expensive patches, less expensive pills or injections, as well as vaginal creams or rings. It has gone in and out of favor with the medical community for decades. Estrogen is the main ingredient in most birth control pills and has been studied extensively in that context as well as in the setting of women whose ovaries have ceased to produce it as they age. It can increase the risk of migraines, blood clots in the legs or lungs, it can cause benign liver tumors and facial pigmentation. It causes growth of the endometrial cells that line the uterus and can increase benign and malignant tumors in that organ. Some breast cancer cells are sensitive to estrogen and can grow when they are exposed to it, so patients with breast cancer try to stay away from it. In addition to treating the annoying symptoms of...

'Tis the season Every year at about this time piles of mail comes to my box asking for money. I look through the pretty envelopes, some with calendars and return address stickers, some with wrapping paper and greeting cards. Some have cleverly glued nickles or plastic membership cards so I can't recycle them without opening them. Occasionally there is an organization which has devised a new model of charity and I'm glad I looked a little further. Giving to charity is a privilege which I have because I make more money than I spend. Not everyone has that luxury. Doctors, as a profession, are much better paid than most people in the world. We may have educational debts to pay off, but eventually we usually end up in the happy minority of people who have enough stored value to take care of themselves and their families and to feel secure if they live awhile past retirement. John F. Kennedy used to like the quote from Luke (this is the passage from the New Standard Revis...

In about 1990 we got our first computer. I say "we" because my husband and I shared a desktop which I used infrequently. I mostly used it for word processing, and the internet was very young. At the turn of the millenium, my children were using computers and they were limited to 1 hour of computer time a day, which was on a shared desktop. By 2001 I was communicating with my grandmother, then in her late 80's, by email. My grandmother had received, probably just prior to the millenium, an email machine from her son. It was a little thing on which she could type messages to a dear friend who lived in London. She loved the ability to spontaneously send him a message and get an answer in a day or less. She was a retired reference librarian and had worked in the Bay Area school system where an exhaustive knowledge of the Dewey Decimal System allowed her to connect students to the resources they needed. We thought she would be delighted to have an Apple Macintosh. With suc...

A letter written to JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Assn.) by Robert Tessler MD and colleagues at the Harborview Injury Prevention and Research Center in Seattle presented evidence that the United States'  approach to guns has significantly increased deaths from terrorism. Using the Global Terrorism Database from 2002-2015 they found that, compared to Canada, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, The US has a considerably higher percentage of terrorist attacks that used firearms and firearm related terrorist attacks were more deadly than any other method, including bombs. Of the 2817 attacks in that time period, only a bit over 9% used guns, but these attacks were responsible for more than half of the fatalities. It's not just terrorism that is more lethal using guns. Suicide attempts are much more successful if they are made with a gun. In fact, over 80% of suicide attempts made with a gun are effective compared to only 1.5% with drug or poison ingestion. Over half o...

Physician burnout and physician suicide has been getting more attention in the last several years. Suicide among physicians is horribly tragic, and maybe moreso because of several factors. Suicide is the quintessentially most preventable fatal event. In order to prevent suicide, the person killing him or herself needs only not do it. To anyone who knows the victim/perpetrator it seems that if only the right words had been spoken, the right sentiment expressed, comfort offered, their death would not have happened. Among the family and friends of a suicide, this is one of the agonies that is added to the pain of loss. Physicians have a huge number of close contacts, patients and coworkers, who have a pretty intimate connection with them, all of whom mourn their loss and many of whom question whether they might have had something to do with it. Beside the emotional impact of the loss is the very real fact that physicians are responsible for some part of the care of potentially thousands...