Why is American health care so expensive?

When I went to medical school over 30 years ago I dreamed of working in exotic places, plagued with poverty, where nothing was familiar and where I could be of use. It sounded deeply gratifying. I imagined that I might escape the small fiddly problems of my privileged life by trading them for large, worthy problems. I longed for the feeling of being sure that I was doing the right thing. Not long after finishing my residency in internal medicine I took a trip to Thailand where, after being a tourist for several days, I visited a leprosy colony run by the Anglican church near the city of Chiang Mai, spending a week there watching and trying to help out. It was profoundly educational. Not only did I learn about the disease but also about all of the creative approaches the hospital there used to manage anything from chronic wounds to physical disability and patients' need to have meaningful work. The patients had illnesses that took years to heal, and they had workshops where they...

When I finished my training I was taught that the vast majority of dementia was Alzheimer's disease, with occasional cases of multi-infarct dementia as well as odd syndromes such as Kreutzfeld-Jacob disease and genetic, traumatic, toxic and tumor related syndromes. Parkinson's disease, we were taught, caused a tremor and freezing up of a person's movements and only very rarely was associated with any kind of memory loss. These teachings helped us modern doctors leave behind terms such as "senility" or "hardening of the arteries" to explain cognitive loss. We still had no useful tools to change the course of dementia, but we were more scientific in our description of it. In the last several years, however, neurologists have determined that there is a very common dementia that is associated with Parkinson's disease. Lewy body disease or Lewy body dementia was a condition that I had been taught was not only uncommon but only accurately diagnosed a...

"If there is a physician on the plane, please press your call light!" The vast majority of doctors who have flown on airplanes have heard this, and most of us are willing, if not entirely eager, to respond. What follows is usually a far from ideal encounter with inadequate information, too much noise, a cramped space to work in and little knowledge of what is expected or even possible. My experiences (I think there have been 3) were people who had become dizzy or had passed out. One of them was pretty frail, but none required that we land before our destination airport. What I learned was that: 1. More than one physician usually responds to these calls. As a general internist, I'm usually the most appropriate person to evaluate the patient (winning out over ophthalmologists, dermatologists and obstetricians.) 2. The flight attendants are very grateful, bring me an extra glass of juice and promise some kind of compensation from the airline which may or may not ma...

The price of new drugs just seems to go up. I've stopped being excited about innovative pharmaceuticals that target various hard to treat diseases and conditions, simply because they cost so horribly much. Each of these new developments looks like a classic philosophical dilemma. Do I pull the lever that makes the trolley kill one person instead of 5 or do I save the one and allow the trolley to kill 5? Do I prescribe the new drug that potentially helps my patient but may destine a whole population to lousy health care by making the overall budget unsupportable? When I was in residency in the 1980's medication that cost a dollar a pill was crazy expensive. Inflation doubles that plus a little more, so think $2.25 and pill in 2018 money. But today's expensive medication costs 10-20 dollars a pill. Or $1000 a pill for the drug to cure hepatitis C. Or, in the case of a now pretty commonly used drug for advanced cancer, $150,000 a year. This is real money. On the lower end,...

The New York Times has pointed out a very interesting coincidence. It was during the presidency of Ronald Reagan that health costs and outcomes began to diverge from the rest of high income countries with which we compare ourselves. In an article by Austin Frakt, a healthcare economist, physicist and mathematician, he points out that America began to abandon healthcare cost controls, except for Medicare, when Ronald Reagan took the helm from Jimmy Carter, who had steadfastly backed limiting public and private healthcare spending. Deregulation of many institutions followed. Regulation of industries related to health were rolled back and new regulations which helped control spending in Europe were not introduced. In the early 1980's insurance companies began to change the way they paid hospitals for their services, introducing "DRG's (diagnosis related groups). Hospitals responded to this change in payment methods, being paid according to diagnosis rather than time or...

This last week a monoclonal antibody injection for migraine was released, with fanfare and great hopes of becoming a commercial success. Amgen developed Aimovig (erenumab) and published its findings in the New England Journal of Medicine last November. It is an injection that targets calcitonin gene-related protein (CGRP), a chemical released in the brain during migraine which dilates blood vessels. The monoclonal antibody inactivates this protein for a long time, on the order of one and a half months. Migraine is often involves head pain, nausea, weird neurological symptoms including vision loss and even stroke symptoms. The combination of symptoms is frequently disabling and "migraineurs" suffer not only from their nausea and headache, but also from large financial burdens associated with the condition, on average around $6000/year for chronic migraine sufferers. The economy loses over $13 billion in lost workdays. Over 44 million people in the US have migraines, thoug...

I just read a "Clinical Problem Solving" case from the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). It was entitled Stream of Consciousness  and it told the story of a 65 year old man who was a patient at the Brigham and Women's Hospital of Harvard Medical School, arguably one of the finest medical institutions in the world. These cases are presented in single paragraphs to a clinical expert physician who then comments about his or her thought processes and discusses how he or she would have handled the situation. In this narrative the patient presented to a different hospital in New England with kidney failure and a gradual onset of confusion in the setting of very high blood pressure. He was then transferred to the Brigham and Women's Hospital for further evaluation and treatment. He had lab tests of all color and stripe along with MRI and CT scans of his brain which showed some disconcerting spots. He had a lumbar puncture and his high blood pressure was treated. Ev...

Healthcare costs in the US are significantly greater than in any other developed country and for this we have a shorter life expectancy than they. We also develop cutting edge technologies and miracle cures and are world leaders in medical research. Just how do we compare with other economically advantaged nations? In a Special Communication article in the JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) this week, Harvard researchers Irene Papanicolas, Liana Woskie and Ashish K. Jha analyzed data from Japan, Australia, Switzerland, Germany, France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Canada, Sweden and Denmark about healthcare and social spending as well as outcomes. It is a huge amount of data gleaned from diverse sources and the authors have presented it beautifully. I will only comment on it and can't possibly do it justice. Still, there are several really interesting facts to point out, so I will dig in. In US dollars, our spending per person per year is higher than ...

Drug costs in the US are higher than in in any other industrialized country in the world. Our cost for an insulin glargine (long acting insulin) pen is $76.80 and in Canada, so very few miles away, it costs $19.60. The latter price is reasonable. The former price can make the difference between being able to afford a life saving drug and dying. It is illegal, however, for a US citizen to buy his or her insulin, or any other drug available in the US, from another country. Costs of pharmaceuticals in other countries are usually regulated by the government. Not so in the US. This is due to the lobbying power of US pharmaceutical companies. Because US citizens pay more for our drugs, we do have earlier access to newly released products than other countries if we can afford them. Our deep pockets help make new drug development attractive to drug companies. For people whose lives depend on the development of a new drug, this is very important. For the vast majority of patients, however, ...

I have just returned from Old Fangak, Jonglei State, South Sudan after my fourth trip. I seem to have earned a welcome there for teaching bedside ultrasound to anyone who will learn and doing ultrasound whenever anybody asks. Also I cook a mean soup and make delicious chocolate sauce in which a homesick American can dip a piece of local deep fried bread dough. The hospital I visit is a community health center which has morphed into a full service hospital for tens of thousands of people displaced by chronic civil war. Jill Seaman, a doctor friend from my home town and a champion of treatment for complex and fatal tropical diseases (particularly Kala Azar and tuberculosis), has coordinated the multiple functions of this center for years. It serves as a distribution point for food aid, a triage center for war wounded when the war is close by, a referral center for treatment of tuberculosis and Kala Azar and now a major outpost for Doctors Without Borders (Medecins sans Frontieres--MS...

I finally finished reading the many journals piled up on my dining room table, which have been shunted to other flat surfaces for projects or the visits of friends. I didn't read them all well, but I touched them all and read what interested me. The early October edition of the Annals of Internal Medicine particularly caught my eye. There were two major articles that looked at determinants of health in a slightly different way. The first used data from the Cleveland Clinic's electronic medical record to see whether the standard prediction calculator that we use to estimate a person's risk for cardiovascular disease works as well in poor as in not-poor neighborhoods. They found that it did not work nearly as well in poor neighborhoods. In fact, whether you have a heart attack or stroke is more determined by whether you live in a poor area of town than whether you have the traditional collection of risk factors for heart disease such as high blood pressure, smoking, di...

Sepsis is one of the most common diagnoses in our hospital that leads to admission to the intensive care unit. Sepsis is the syndrome that comes from uncontrolled, usually bacterial, infection and is not uncommonly fatal. Bacteria are everywhere and live in and on us, in balance with each other and supporting our bodily functions. Occasionally they invade our tissues resulting in infection. The body responds by releasing white blood cells which kill the bacteria by various mechanisms including producing chemicals that make us feel sick. These chemicals raise our temperature, cause our blood vessels to dilate, lowering our blood pressure and raising our heart and breathing rates. Sometimes this whole process causes kidney, heart and lung failure as well as delirium. The infections that can cause sepsis can involve all kinds of bacteria or other microorganisms and start in any of a large number of areas including the skin, lungs, kidneys, brain and abdominal organs. Our usual treatme...