Why is American health care so expensive?

I just returned a few days ago from the Republic of South Sudan, where I spent about 3 weeks. Jet lag is fading, and in time I may even stop complaining about how incomprehensibly bad the Juba airport was. Overall the experience was great, though. My intention was to spend 2 weeks with my friend Jill Seaman , a doctor who has been working in Sudan for decades, primarily fighting tuberculosis and visceral leishmaniasis by establishing  and pushing treatment protocols. Jill now helps run a community hospital in the (usually) tiny town of Old Fangak, on the Zeraf River. The hospital serves a community that usually numbers a few thousand along with anyone who can make their way there, but now Old Fangak has become a busy metropolis of over 30,000 people because of the many people who have fled their homes due to fighting. My job was to help out with patient care and teach bedside ultrasound. The other week of my three week trip is how long it takes to get to and from Old Fa...

An article from the JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) has been gnawing at my consciousness for the last couple of weeks. Dr. Prashant Kaul and colleagues out of the University of North Carolina reviewed records from hospitals in the state of California from 2008 through 2011, looking for patients who had been hospitalized with heart attacks. Specifically, they were looking for patients with ST elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI), which are generally the most damaging and deadly of the events generally known as heart attacks, due to the amount of damage they do to the heart muscle. The authors compared patients who were already in the hospital for another reason when they had their heart attack, versus ones who were admitted specifically for heart attacks. They found that the patients who were admitted specifically for the heart attacks were generally younger and healthier, more often male, and were much more likely to survive than the ones who were hospitalized ...