Why is American health care so expensive?

In about 1990 we got our first computer. I say "we" because my husband and I shared a desktop which I used infrequently. I mostly used it for word processing, and the internet was very young. At the turn of the millenium, my children were using computers and they were limited to 1 hour of computer time a day, which was on a shared desktop. By 2001 I was communicating with my grandmother, then in her late 80's, by email. My grandmother had received, probably just prior to the millenium, an email machine from her son. It was a little thing on which she could type messages to a dear friend who lived in London. She loved the ability to spontaneously send him a message and get an answer in a day or less. She was a retired reference librarian and had worked in the Bay Area school system where an exhaustive knowledge of the Dewey Decimal System allowed her to connect students to the resources they needed. We thought she would be delighted to have an Apple Macintosh. With suc...

A letter written to JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Assn.) by Robert Tessler MD and colleagues at the Harborview Injury Prevention and Research Center in Seattle presented evidence that the United States'  approach to guns has significantly increased deaths from terrorism. Using the Global Terrorism Database from 2002-2015 they found that, compared to Canada, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, The US has a considerably higher percentage of terrorist attacks that used firearms and firearm related terrorist attacks were more deadly than any other method, including bombs. Of the 2817 attacks in that time period, only a bit over 9% used guns, but these attacks were responsible for more than half of the fatalities. It's not just terrorism that is more lethal using guns. Suicide attempts are much more successful if they are made with a gun. In fact, over 80% of suicide attempts made with a gun are effective compared to only 1.5% with drug or poison ingestion. Over half o...

Physician burnout and physician suicide has been getting more attention in the last several years. Suicide among physicians is horribly tragic, and maybe moreso because of several factors. Suicide is the quintessentially most preventable fatal event. In order to prevent suicide, the person killing him or herself needs only not do it. To anyone who knows the victim/perpetrator it seems that if only the right words had been spoken, the right sentiment expressed, comfort offered, their death would not have happened. Among the family and friends of a suicide, this is one of the agonies that is added to the pain of loss. Physicians have a huge number of close contacts, patients and coworkers, who have a pretty intimate connection with them, all of whom mourn their loss and many of whom question whether they might have had something to do with it. Beside the emotional impact of the loss is the very real fact that physicians are responsible for some part of the care of potentially thousands...