Why is American health care so expensive?

I bought a pocket ultrasound in 2011, determined to learn how to perform and interpret ultrasound at the bedside and thus transform my internal medicine practice. I bought it new and it cost over $8000. That was a staggering amount of money to spend on something I knew very little about. In 2015 after having performed many thousand ultrasound exams with my little GE Vscan with the phased array transducer, I replaced it with the new model which had a dual transducer, with one side for deep structures and one for superficial structures, such as bones and blood vessels. It cost around $10,000. This was an even more staggering amount of money, but more of a sure thing. I knew that it made a difference and that the cost of the machine was a very small portion of the benefit that I would get from using it. Since the time I bought the new machine, GE has come out with an even fancier machine that is just a wee bit faster and has internet connectivity and a touch screen. Because everyone n...

Today in the New England Journal of Medicine I read an editorial that discussed how lectures are being phased out in medical school education. I was, at first, a little bit appalled. Why would they eliminate an educational method that worked so well for me and my generation of doctors? Or did it? I actually remember only a few things now from lectures, and all of those things don't support the idea that lectures were an effective way of teaching. I remember vividly how I would fall asleep and write progressively more poetic and less linear notes in my binder. How I would startle myself awake, causing heavy textbooks to fly in the air. I remember the time when the professor showed us the structure of vitamin B12 and I considered learning it, just for grins, and decided not to. I remember formulating questions for the lecturer that would display such minuscule understanding of the material that he or she would actually understand how deeply we students had been left in the dust....