Why is American health care so expensive?

We're having a curtailed winter and early spring here in the inland northwest, or so it seems. We could still get a snowstorm or two, but the crocuses are blooming and the redwing blackbirds are singing by the unfrozen ponds. Despite the mild temperatures and sunny skies we are still having an influenza epidemic and many of our patients with chronic lung disease are becoming sick with wheezing and low oxygen levels. We have rapid tests for influenza and for another lung infection, respiratory syncitial virus (RSV) and I am presently seeing less flu and more RSV. I have never routinely checked my patients with asthma and COPD exacerbations for respiratory syncitial virus. I thought that it was one of  those tests that would take so long to come back from the lab that the patient would be well before I ever found out the result. It is possible, though, to get a result back from a rapid antigen detection test (much like a home pregnancy test) using a sample of mucus from the back ...

The US population is getting older. There are about 9 million Americans who are over the age of 80 and about half of them need some kind of help in the activities of daily life. About 1.3 million Americans live in nursing homes. The average yearly cost to live in a nursing home is over $80,000, but that varies hugely by location. In San Francisco, the average cost of a year's stay is $144,000. In my state, which is notoriously cheap, if you live in a small town away from the big universities and population centers, it would cost closer to $68,000. This is quite the deal, but still more than double the average yearly salary for a working person. The total costs associated with nursing homes and assisted living in the US was $255.8 billion in 2013, according to the Medicare data. Expensive, and... What do you get for all that money? It varies, but generally nursing homes are older buildings and rooms are shared and often cramped. There is a hospital bed for each patient, somet...

Lately there has been an outbreak of measles, a vaccine preventable disease, along with an outbreak of people yelling at each other. There have been angry exchanges between people who would like all children vaccinated according to the recommended guidelines and people who support the rights of parents to choose which vaccines to give their children, if any, and when to give them. There has been much focus on the assertion, particularly, that the Measles/Mumps/Rubella vaccination (MMR) might cause autism. There is no believable evidence to support that assertion, but the questions of whether vaccination is safe and whether it should be required are much more interesting. Yay Vaccines! I am a big fan of vaccination as a means of fighting disease. It is an ingenious concept. The recipient of a vaccination gets an injection or oral dose of a weakened virus or bacterium or an inactive part of one, which causes the body's own immune system to produce cells that will recognize and ...