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...