Why is American health care so expensive?

In 2003 the Medicare Modernization Act added a prescription drug plan to the benefits available to seniors and disabled adults. The act did a few other things, including introducing health savings accounts and defining Medicare Advantage Plans. The prescription drug plan rolled out in 2006, after which time seniors who bought the extra coverage had some help paying for their ever more expensive drugs. Today the government pays about $70 billion per year to provide this service, 11% of the total cost of Medicare. The purpose of Medicare Part D was to allow seniors, often the most financially vulnerable of our patients, to be able to afford to pay for medications without impoverishing themselves. Since medications are such an important part of treating the diseases of aging, the government hoped that seniors who were able to pay for necessary medications would be healthier, requiring fewer hospitalizations and emergency room visits. This improvement seemed likely to, at least partial...

A few weeks ago I was feeling angry and disappointed when I noticed that many of the articles I was reading in my favorite medical journal were funded by companies who made the products those articles evaluated (that blog here ). This is nothing new, but it looks to me like there are increasingly more of these articles which celebrate products and fewer interesting articles about the science of medicine. The other thing that is particularly irritating about this trend, if it is a trend, is that the drugs and devices that are being sold are increasingly more expensive and benefit fewer and fewer people. The reason they benefit fewer people is that they are designed for very specific, and often pretty rare, diseases. Also, since they are so expensive, only a subset of these few people can afford them. They must be very expensive because they benefit fewer and fewer people, so in order to make the money to pay for the research to come up with these drugs and devices, the companies charg...