Why is American health care so expensive?

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...