Why is American health care so expensive?

I am, or will be, a "bad patient." The "good patient" accepts advice gracefully. The "bad patient" may not be a bad person, but does not play the part of the patient well. The word patient comes from the Latin word root pati, to suffer. The "good patient" suffers well, and accepts help from a physician,who Merriam Webster defines as someone skilled in the art of healing. This relationship is one in which the roles are well defined. When the patient is not actually suffering and is even more confusingly "skilled in the art of healing" the roles get really wonky. I will be this kind of "bad patient." One way in which I do not play the part of the patient well regards preventive medicine. I am getting to an age at which various things are recommended in order to reduce my risk of developing some dread disease. When it comes to these recommendations, I find that I have become quite the picky consumer. I would dearly love not t...

I recently read a discussion by 3 hypertension specialists, Drs. Jan Basile, Dominic Sica and David Kountz, on how to treat "resistant hypertension." Resistant hypertension is blood pressure that remains above goal despite treatment with 3 drugs, from different classes, one of which must be a diuretic. 10-15% of patients with high blood pressure will have resistant hypertension. These are the people who always seem to have blood pressure at levels that are concerning despite using medications that should be working. We wonder if they are actually taking the medications, but they assure us they are. It's almost like they are just taking sugar pills. Often patients such as these have extensive testing to see why their blood pressures are so high. They get put on even more medications which then have side effects, and eventually we may just give up and decide that they are as good as they are going to get. Giving up helps to avoid still more medication side effects, but ...

About 2 years ago I finished the process of recertifying for the American Board of Internal Medicine. I had last done this in 1990 and had a time unlimited certification, but had heard that recertification, which included doing a certain amount of studying and then taking a long test, was a good idea. Specifically, one internal medicine physician had written an article about the process, which sounded a little like a medieval quest, complete with hardship and mortification. That sounded perversely attractive. The process was expensive, about $1500 (now $1940) to sign up for the whole deal, which involved keeping track of the educational modules on the ABIM site, access to some educational material and completion of a Practice Improvement Module which was more disruptive than the rest of the process. I had several options, but chose to evaluate how well I was doing on preventive medicine, things like getting my patients to do mammograms and colonoscopies and screening blood tests an...