Why is American health care so expensive?

A couple of weeks ago I started taking medicine to lower my blood pressure and another to reduce my cholesterol. This was a controversial move, given my deep distrust of the practice of medicine, when it is practiced on me, and pharmaceuticals in particular. I know that, as a woman of 55 with an very active and healthy lifestyle, no chronic diseases and most importantly as a nonsmoker, I am at very low risk for any of the conditions that high blood pressure or high cholesterol could cause to happen. I am unlikely to have a stroke or a heart attack, develop narrowing of the arteries to my legs or develop kidney failure. The blood pressure and cholesterol levels have no effect at all on how healthy I feel. But one day, while pointing an ultrasound probe at my own neck, I saw a small plaque (a thickened area) in my left carotid artery. It was very calcified, which meant that it had been there a long while, but my carotid was not pristine. It is undeniable: I have vascular disease. Wil...

The last year has been difficult to watch, and the last few months even more so. News and quasi-news organizations have been bombarding my email with stories about the people vying for our presidency. It has been anywhere from difficult to completely impossible to screen this information for accuracy. Lies and information taken out of context and repeated until it seems true has been part of both party's rhetoric. The whole field of potential candidates were infected with it before the primary elections. The emotions have been high, too. By the time the election finally happened on November 8th, we had a comic book villain straight out of the Batman movies running against Satan in female form. The outcome has left people deeply sad and frightened, even people who voted for the winner. There is hope, too, and kindness and gathering together. There is huge uncertainty. I've been alive for 13 presidential elections, and this one was really different. This is partly because o...

An article released today in the JAMA sites evidence that the suicide rate in America has risen by 24% in the last 15 years associated with a significant reduction in the numbers of psychiatric beds available. The US has had a lower capacity for psychiatric patients than comparable countries in Europe for years, but in between 1998 and 2013 that number dropped even further. Waiting in the ER for days This trend has resulted in atrocious treatment for people with mental illness. Because it is so difficult to find room in a mental hospital for patients with mental conditions that make it unsafe for them to return home, such as suicidal thoughts or intentions, we sometimes see these people spend days or even weeks in emergency rooms just waiting for something to open up. I never saw this a decade ago, but now it is not uncommon, even in our small critical access hospital, to see a patient in one of the little windowless and noisy cubicles of our ER for days at a time. They can't...

One day a few weeks ago, after returning from a set of seven 12 hour shifts in a hospital away from home, my husband convinced me to go to a concert. The group performing was the Deviant Septet , based out of Brooklyn, NY. They were an odd combination of instruments and they played mostly newly composed music. The second piece in their program was by Chris Cerrone and was called "Recovering." I expected nothing, perhaps a nap even, but was completely absorbed by the music which wordlessly represented a magical period that I get to observe regularly but rarely remark upon. Patients come in to the hospital when they are sick, and often getting sicker. They are vulnerable and place themselves in the hands of strangers. Usually they feel terrible. We do things to them to try to make them better. Often we are successful. And then something magical happens. Their faces look brighter. Their vital signs stabilize. Their eyes focus. They make jokes. It's still not over, thou...

After 5 years of doing bedside ultrasound, I'm still excited about it. Bedside, or Point-of-Care ultrasound is using an ultrasound machine during the physical examination of a patient in order to make a diagnosis. I use a pretty tiny machine that fits in my pocket. As an internist who works in the hospital and in rural clinic outpatient settings, I get to use my ultrasound all the time, and it's still lots of fun. (For more on adventures in ultrasound see this  or  this  or  this .) Those of you who have read this blog for awhile can skip the intro and go to the cool cases. When I talk about it, most people who haven't already heard me wax eloquent say, "you mean you look at babies?" Ultrasound has been used as a bedside tool for looking at pregnant wombs for a very long time. It is extremely useful for that, since you can see if the baby is alive, about how old it is, whether their are two, what position it is in and a number of other useful things. I would n...

The British National Health Service (NHS) was born in 1948, based on legislation passed that year mandating free high quality healthcare for all paid by taxes. In contrast, the US started Medicare in 1966 to provide healthcare to the elderly and the State Children's Insurance Program (SCHIP) in 1993 to fund healthcare for children whose parents were unable to afford it. Healthcare in the UK is still almost entirely funded by the government (through taxes, of course), which it is not in the USA. Britain is proud of the NHS, and rightly so. They have it figured out. Or so it would seem. Everyone can get care and nobody goes bankrupt because of huge medical bills. Brits do have to pay for prescriptions but everything costs the same, the equivalent of $11 per month. So why would the Economist, the global news magazine based in London, call it a mess? This article  says that the NHS is in trouble, and needs to learn some new tricks in order to stay effective. It turns out that Bri...

A few months ago I had a clever idea about how my husband could use my cell phone in England, because getting cell phone service across the Atlantic can be expensive and inconvenient.   So I had this bright idea. I have an unlocked smartphone that I use in Africa or Haiti with a sim card that I can buy there cheaply and with no difficulty. T-mobile, the cellular phone provider that began as a German company and has provided competitive service in the US, advertised that their service would also work in the UK and Europe and that it would include unlimited data. Or something like that. It sounded great. I would just buy the T-mobile sim card in the drugstore here, get the service and be good to go. But not so fast. T-mobile does have the no fuss pre-paid option, but to get the international service requires a different plan, with a monthly fee. After attempting to do this online, then converting to the monthly service, nearly losing the money I had mistakenly spent on prepa...

"I'm going to the doctor next week for my yearly physical." So normal. Of course you are. Everyone should do that. But the concept of a yearly examination of one's whole body to see if everything checks out fine is a relatively new invention and whether or not it is necessary is a very controversial question. I just read an article by Abraham Verghese, an internist and champion of physical diagnosis, professor at Stanford University, inspired writer, about the history of the physical exam. The idea that physicians could know more about a person than he or she could know about him or herself has only gained traction in the last century and comes partly from the invention of gadgets such as the stethoscope, the reflex hammer and the blood pressure cuff which reveal truths only to those of us skilled in their use. Enthusiasm for these has waned a bit as we have become enamored of our ability to see the shadows made by bones and such during an onslaught of elec...

I visited Tanzania again this summer, once again helping a group of amazing University of California, Irvine medical students with their summer not-a-vacation trip to teach bedside ultrasound and do other research projects.  One of the projects this year sprung out of a request by a doctor we have worked with on Ukerewe Island. The island he serves is rural, primarily supported by fishing, and has a high rate of sexually transmitted diseases due to fishermen visiting prostitutes on the mainland and bringing home infections to their wives and girlfriends. This translates to high rates of HIV infection, pelvic inflammatory disease and the spectrum of disease caused by human papillomavirus (HPV). HPV can cause genital warts, which are only mildly distressing, but it can also set in motion cellular changes of the cervix that can lead to cervical cancer. Tanzania has a distressingly high incidence and death rate from cervical cancer and this Tanzanian physician asked one of the stude...

About 4 years ago I was examining my neck and discovered a nodule in the right side of my thyroid gland. I was examining my neck because I very rarely see a doctor and figured that I should at least cursorily examine myself to see if I could find anything of interest. My heart sounded fine, my lungs were excellent, weight was just right, pulse was nice and low, liver and spleen were fine, skin was slightly sun damaged but basically OK, blood pressure was a tad high and there was a small but definite lump in the right side of my neck. Since I have a portable ultrasound, I looked at my thyroid nodule and found it to be about 1.8 cm, with some internal calcifications and a bright capsule. It was slightly darker than the surrounding thyroid tissue and had a few visible blood vessels. I read about thyroid nodules and found that: 1. They are being noticed much more frequently because of increased use of CT scanning and ultrasound imaging. 2. They are very common. Nearly half of peo...

I recently attended the death of a friend at his home. He had a disease that was terminal and untreatable and he and his wife had finally decided on no further medical treatments that would require hospitalization. He was not very old and had been cared for by his children and wife during the previous 4 months that he couldn't care for himself. Time had become short and valuable and he had become weak, so he didn't amend his POST (Physician's Order for Scope of Treatment) to indicate that he wanted no resuscitation, though his wife and family knew his preferences. He had not entered hospice because his needs were adequately fulfilled by his family, friends, his physicians and home health. When his wife noticed his breathing had changed, she called me, a friend of the family. I had offered to be available to come over for any medical situation in which they might need a rapid house call. I arrived about 15 minutes later and he had just died. I confirmed the situation wit...

Today in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) an article has appeared reporting the results of the Heart Outcomes Prevention Evaluation-3 (HOPE-3)trial. Exciting simplifications are sure to follow in the news. If you would like to stop reading now, the answer to the question posed in the title is probably no. The question: For many years researchers have discussed the possibility of a creating a pill that might contain several kinds of medication that would reduce people's risk of dying of cardiovascular disease. It is an attractive thought. Since cardiovascular disease is the major cause of death globally, reducing that risk has the potential to vastly reduce death and disability. Originally we thought that a suitable "polypill" might contain something to lower the blood pressure, something to lower cholesterol and something to reduce the risk of blood clots. Many studies have looked at the mortality benefits of various blood pressure pills, cholesterol lo...

Splashed over news feeds this last week is a reference to an article published last week in the BMJ (formerly known as the British Medical Journal) that states that "medical error [is] the third leading cause of death in the United States." What is this article actually about? The new article refers to research done over the last 2 decades, and most recently an article by NASA toxicologist and patient safety advocate John T. James PhD in the Journal of Patient Safety in 2013. Dr. James evaluated 4 previous studies and estimated that 400,000 people, approximately, die yearly in the US of conditions that were either caused by or, more often,  made worse by medical error. That article, too, was met by outrage and was widely quoted and misinterpreted. I think hardly anybody actually read the article. Headlines read "Deaths by Medical Mistakes Claim the Lives of 400,000 People Each Year." No new data, but a new way to think about it: As far as I can tell fr...

Today in JAMA online (the Journal of the American Medical Association) a delightfully practical article was published regarding how to help little children recover from gastroenteritis (stomach flu.) The authors, Doctors Stephen Freedman, Andrew Willan, Kathy Boutis and Suzanne Schuh, compared the health of over 600 children aged 6 months to 5 years, when given a medical rehydration solution to drink versus diluted apple juice along with the fluids that the child preferred. These children were not chronically ill or severely dehydrated, but were sick enough to have been brought by their parents to the emergency department and were at risk for needing hospitalization or intravenous fluids. In previous studies oral rehydration with electrolyte solutions such as Pedialyte, which contain over twice as much sodium and 6 times as much potassium as sports drinks, along with much less sugar, had performed well in preventing hospitalization or return to the emergency department. Theore...