Why is American health care so expensive?

Last Spring I got a junk e-mail offering a free "Echo survival course" from the University of Vienna, in Austria. I just had to go to a website, enter my e-mail, and I would get 4 free modules on basic echocardiography. Cool, I thought. Free knowledge! I've wanted to know the deepest secrets of echocardiography since I was a wee medical student a quarter of a century ago. But why, one might ask, would it be relevant for me to know echocardiography? I'm not a cardiologist after all. Cardiologists are the people who read most of the heart ultrasounds, or echocardiograms, that are performed in the US. The usual routine is that someone like me, a general internist, or a family practitioner, orders an echocardiogram for a patient with a suspected heart problem. An ultrasonographer, a non-physician with expertise in performing ultrasounds of the heart, obtains images of the heart from various views, saves representative images, performs calculations of movements and siz...

Ebola virus has grabbed headlines since the epidemic started in West Africa nearly a year ago. The death toll is estimated at 4500 people, and the epidemic continues to spread. One person infected in Liberia returned to Texas with the disease and died, infecting maybe 2 healthcare workers. Ebola is a nasty virus, surely, with a case fatality rate of 80%. Overall health and nutrition as well as living conditions have an effect on how sick a person gets with it. We have no good treatments, though antibodies and other biologically based treatments are being used and may be rapidly developed to combat the disease. But have we forgotten influenza? Influenza is a nasty virus, with a few marginally helpful treatments. Its symptoms are fever, headache, cough, sore throat, runny nose, sometimes also heart failure, respiratory failure and brain dysfunction. It will likely kill tens of thousands of Americans this season, mostly the very old and very young, but also perfectly healthy people. ...

Drug prices are a difficult issue to write about because real data about the workings of pharmaceutical companies is very difficult to uncover. Still, last week I came face to face with something that seemed extremely not right and so I feel I should at least make some comment. It started when I prescribed a patient sumatriptan for her recently more frequent migraines. Her cost exceeded my wildest expectations. Sumatriptan is a nearly magical medicine which was FDA approved in 1991 for treatment of acute migraines.* It is similar to the neurotransmitter serotonin and reduces inflammation of arteries in the brain which is associated with migraine headaches. It does other things as well, and may have a much more complex mechanism of action. Although it has some side effects, it works well for most people, can be given as an injection, pill or nasal spray and doesn't cause drowsiness, constipation or nausea like many other pain medications can. When sumatriptan was first released,...

Moxifloxacin and MRSA. Why is this interesting? Moxifloxacin The drug company Bayer applied for a patent on yet another drug in the flouroquinolone category of antibiotics in 1989 and received approval by the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) in 1999 for Avelox, the brand name they gave to moxifloxacin. A Japanese company had discovered in the 1970's that adding a flourine to relatively ineffective antibiotics in the quinolone family, such as nalidixic acid, made them dramatically more active, thus creating flouroquinolones. That discovery led to the development of norfloxacin, then ciprofloxacin and levofloxacin which have become mainstays of antibiotic therapy. Ciprofloxacin is extremely useful for treating urinary infections and a variety of other serious infections including anthrax and traveler's diarrhea. Levofloxacin has become one of our drugs of choice for treating pneumonia and is especially useful because it achieves the same levels when given by mouth as it do...