Why is American health care so expensive?

I just finished reading a very delightful "A Piece of My Mind" essay in JAMA (The Journal of the American Medical Association.) The JAMA is primarily a research journal, filled with new scientific or semi-scientific studies and comments on those, plus reviews of the literature and editorials on science or politics. There are also letters and announcements and educational sections for doctors or patients, even poems, but the part I like to read all the way through is called "A Piece of My Mind." These essays are almost always stories about something that has made a profound impression on the writer. The most recent title was "A Place to Stay," written by Benjamin Clark, an internist at the Yale New Haven Medical Center. He describes a patient who is stuck in the hospital probably for the rest of his life due to a medical condition whose treatment requires management that can't be done anywhere else. It's lovely, and true (even if the details are ...

In 2005 Dr. John Ioannidis, a Greek researcher and professor of health policy at Stanford University, best known for his critiques of the science of medicine, published a paper entitled "Why Most Published Research Findings are False." This was not from the point of view of a science denier--actually closer to the opposite. Ioannidis loves good science, but points out that the vast majority of scientific studies today are biased, often asking the wrong questions and making the wrong inferences. In the case of medicine, this often means that claims of the effectiveness of a treatment or diagnostic test are exaggerated and often just plain wrong. This stems partly from the fact that positive and exciting results lead to further funding for the researcher involved and that the sources of this funding are often entities such as drug companies that stand to benefit from a certain outcome. Recently Dr. Ioannidis published a new article, much more accessible than the first, ent...